Here to help

Monthly photography revenue: $5 Monthly photography audience: 9 million across Unsplash and Pexels.

Can someone check on Mark Di Stefano? Surely the trust fund babies have a price on his head now?

There’s a lot said about how we Aussies are more divided and alone than we ever have been in this country.

But when I see multiple cars across lanes of traffic work together to hilariously block an aggressive driver from getting ahead in the traffic I reckon there’s voice left in us yet, Australia.

Vote yes.

Show me a more “Aussie” Aussie, than this legit Aussie legend.

I’ll wait.

I have a confession to make: I’ve built an Australian news website that is purely created by large language models. It’s autonomous and although I can edit, delete, and stop it, I don’t unless something bad happens.

It’s been a week so far and honestly, I prefer reading it to the other news websites that inspire it.

It’s public but I’m scared about sharing it just yet.

I’ve also been having an LLM rewrite a friend’s blog and I love it.

Uluru is such an icon. Its simple beautiful existence is one of my earliest memories, reading about it in encyclopaedias or National Geographic and Australian Geographic magazines. Seeing it in advertisements and in movies, Oprah and Young Einstein, but back then everyone called it Ayers Rock. Today we call it what it always has been: Uluru.

Uluru has had a complicated 200-odd years of history. Before Europeans visited Australia for the first time, the red centre was just plodding along quite well as a special place for the Aṉangu people and neighbouring Aboriginal nations.

But a few years ago everything changed. In the 1870s some white blokes sighted Uluru. 1936 saw the first tourists arrive, 12 years later some tracks that would become roads were laid, and in 1959 Eddie Connellan built an airstrip. His name’s important later on in this story.

I’ve been lucky to witness Uluru’s glory twice now and the main difference since the last time was that in 2016 people were climbing the rock, and now in 2023 every cafe, restaurant, and bar was alive with talk about Uluru from a political point of view. Some talking about the Voice to Parliament soon going to a referendum, some talking about climbing it or why we can’t now, others talking about everything you can or can not do in the area - like drinking and taking photos in certain areas, and most were talking about how the extraordinarily high prices for everything was married to a general lack of enthusiasm from staff for visitors to be present.

Most of my visit this time - aside from creating the marriage ceremony I was hired to create - was spent thinking about a comedic video I’ve seen on social media a few times recently. The premise of the video is that before a theatre performance an MC offers an acknowledgment of country before the protagonist, an audience member, asks if everyone should leave. She says “if we’re on someone else’s land, we should leave, shouldn’t we?” going further to ask if proceeds from ticket sales were going to the owners. It’s a joke at the expense of what can often seem like token or hollow effort to just be better about how Australia, the whole island and surrounding islands, were inhabited by intelligent, valid, interesting humans well before Europeans turned up and started naming things and claiming areas. Not just one group of people called Australia home, hundreds of different Aboriginal nations did.

For a few years the people new to the land were pretty bloody horrible to the locals, genocide-horrible, and in recent years current generations of leaders across the spectrum of Australian society have been throwing around the hot potato of how to deal with this generational trauma.

I was born on the Gold Coast, gifted an Australian citizenship, freedom to roam this entire country (unless there’s some pandemic apparently) and yet thrust into a political debate about being welcomed to a land, land ownership, land use, and land respect.

I’m voting yes for a voice to parliament, I believe it’s the right thing to do but I don’t think it’s the only thing we should do, there’s a far bigger elephant in the room.

As native titles are transferred, and places like Uluru fall more into line with the wishes of the owners, what should happen on that land? Should we leave?

1993 saw the Northern Territory government acknowledge the local name of the rock in a dual naming situation, eight years after the land was returned to the original owners, but still today the airport and the resort keep the names Ayers Rock. As you enter the airport you’ll see the name of the original airstrip builder on the building (Connellan) but to be sure not to confuse the tourists the airport you book a flight to and the motel you book a room at are the right ones, they carry the name Ayers Rock. Obviously they’re keen on keeping that revenue, and I’m keen to keep giving it.

But, customer service at most of the stores and businesses is by First National people and despite paying top-shelf prices I can’t help but feel that they’d be happier if we weren’t there. After all, we were on their land and after we set up shop there (and put chains up the rock) we gave it back to them as long as we could stay.

I’m invited to Ayers Rock this week in my capacity as a wedding celebrant by a German couple who want to commit to marriage in an iconic, unforgettable, location. They plan to apply for residency and wanted to have the most Aussie wedding ever: at Uluru. (Photos below)

The location they choose for the ceremony seemed to be ok in my humble Australian citizen opinion. The lines on the side of the road were white (not yellow “no stopping” lines), and the land off the road was unfenced. So, we started exchanging vows about twenty metres off the road and quite soon after an unhappy first Nations lady, driving a Toyota land cruiser and flashing a card that meant she could tell us what to do, told us what to do and to move on. We did respectfully, to the sunset viewing area that she suggested.

But the overwhelming experience of Uluru for my German friends and others we talked to, second to the rock’s overwhelming beauty, is that the rest of us aren’t really all that welcome - but our money is.

Which is a confusing position to leave all of us, including the First Nations people, in.

I have a proposal for all of us to consider. Let’s go all in. If we’re supposed to leave, please let me know. If we’re not supposed to be in Uluru please let Qantas and the motels know.

But if we’re going to stay, let’s work out how we can do that in a way where I don’t feel like I’ve committed genocide by asking for a $30 burger that the menu said I could have if I ordered it.

And if we’ll stay, let’s right our wrongs as a community, as a nation, as invaders, as citizens, and as residents. This middle ground was and is necessary, like birthing pains it has been taking us somewhere beautiful, I just don’t think anyone with the power to decide knows where we are going.

My family came to Australia in 1903, I sure hope that by 2103 the society my grandchildren live in will be one of unity and joy, not constant tension and racism.

So let’s figure out where we’re going and let’s go there.

Flying into Sydney over the Blue Mountains from Uluru this afternoon was a visual treat

Two Google conspiracy theories proven true today:

1: Google Chrome tracks and shares your web browsing for advertising purposes:

Chrome now directly tracks users, generates a “topic” list it shares with advertisers.

2: Google Assistant shares your queries for advertising purposes: Research paper.

Podcast recommendation for the media, podcasting, and tech nerds in my circles: Really Specific Stories. It’s by @martinfeld of @HemisphericViews on “the narratives of tech-podcast fandom and the role of open RSS”. Two of my favourite episodes so far are with @marco and @jsnell.

Shane Parrish on playing the long game:

Every action is a step toward the short game or the long game. You can’t opt out, and you can’t play a long-term game in everything. You need to pick what matters to you. But in everything you do, time amplifies the difference between strategies that work in the short term and ones that work in the long term. The long game allows you to compound results. The longer you play, the bigger the rewards.

Duelling Retro Roos sighting

Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together—just the two of you. A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people—people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

– EB White

Most of us, me included, can barely think past the next three minutes. We operate in this fear of lack, lack of good or sleep or money, that completely ignores the long arc of our life which gives us decades of evidence that we haven’t gone without yet, and all trend lines point to us being fine in the future.

That’s one of the elements of marriage I love so much.

In marriage you’re forced - by its very nature - to acknowledge that your life is far bigger than this three minute period of stress and anxiety we’re currently facing - in fact we have a whole life ahead of us, and considering that big picture, it’d be great to have someone else in it.

I’m so glad I got over myself long enough to realise that my big picture was missing you, Britt, thank you for making it so much better by simply being you.

Happy 11th anniversary xx

I’ve driven 737km today, I have 93 left, and I just want to say there needs to be a royal commission into the state of servo food in this once great nation.

I often wonder if Lin-Manuel Miranda is working on a Peggy spin-off

Many thanks to the airline gods for offering up a new CEO for our national flights of Australia for make benefit glorious nation of Qantastralia! May our new blessed CEO that is the one and only decision maker in the entire organisation, no board of directors or any other executive staff. Make good our glorious airline that can now do no wrong and only make good decisions. Whoever the former CEO was, whatever their name, sexuality, or ethnicity was - I forget - may that bad person be forever gone to go lead some European airline far, far away, from our great nation.

Qantas forever!

The lead singer responsible for bringing this century its greatest motivational pop/ska punk/power pop song, All Star, has passed away.

Pitchfork:

Steve Harwell, the founding singer of Smash Mouth, died today at his home in Boise, Idaho, of liver failure, The New York Times reports. The musician was 56 years old. Harwell dealt with alcoholism and numerous health issues in the years preceding his death.

Smash Mouth undeniably left a dent on pop culture from 1999 onwards, and when I saw the band perform in November 2018 it was stale performance from a tired Steve with a team of young local musos behind him, yet the songs struck that joyful chord in my born-in-1981 heart.

But I want to leave you with Steve’s 2003 cover of Neil Diamond’s You Are My Number One.

Hold me down I’m gonna fly straight to heaven Hold me down Dont ever let go I’ve been around You know I can’t stay forever And when I leave I want you to know - When I’m finally gone, I’m gonna be gone without a trace There’s a lot of good times ahead before we’re done

As someone commented on X, with Jimmy Buffet passing it’s not a great week for guys who liked to party, but it seems like Steve was self-aware enough to know that all of our days are numbered.

I just hope the girl with the shape of an L on her forehead had nothing to do with this.

Selling my beloved vintage Leica Z2X 35mm film camera for $700 AUD.

I bought it in Paris but I’d like to step up to a bigger film camera. The Leica has a 35-70mm zoom lens, autofocus is super quick and precise, so no more blurry pics, smart exposure control for a point-and-shoot film camera, shutter speed ranges from a slow 1/4 sec to a fast 1/300 sec. Plus, there’s a “B” setting for long exposures. Serial number is 2378996 and it’s got that infectious red dot.

Available for pickup on the Gold Coast (Palm Beach) or I can deliver to Brisbane, Sydney, Hobart, or weirdly Uluru over the next two weeks as those are places I’m going to be. Also driving from Sydney up to Gold Coast on Tuesday so I can deliver on the way.

Slip into my DMs if you’re keen.

Examples

Here’s some photos made with the camera around Paris this year. These images were scanned in Paris, I’ve straightened a few but the colours and exposure are out of camera.

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Can anyone I know remember the name of the modern web browser for MacOS System 9? I don’t know why this matters to me so much but I need to browse the web inside a virtual machine of System 9 just to feel something today while I wait for news to occur for today’s Sizzle.

I’m a part of the Hobart wedding trail coming up in a few weeks. I’m expecting a great crowd to fly down and come and jump on a bus or boat and check out the Tasmanian wedding scene. My friend Nina at Isle Weddings is hosting, check out her website for more info.

You’re never going to guess who Nouba interviewed.

I’m guest editing The Sizzle today. Apologies for any banana peel in the email.

I’m the guest on the most recent episode of Polka Dot Wedding’s Feel Good Wedding Podcast. My audio recording isn’t great because it was recorded in a small tiled Italian co-working office room, but the sentiment is great: getting married can be and should be awesome and enjoyable.

Listen on their website or in your podcast app of choice.

And thank you to Dorothy and Mary for having me :)

YouTube bringing that dad energy

Death to paper straws

Home

Can confirm, hearing the instrumental “Still Call Australia Home” as you’re settling in your seat as everyone boards, tickles an emotional muscle.

I’m in the Qantas Singapore Lounge and the waiter poured me a glass of Shiraz, a 2020 from South Australia, on the left.

I make the joke, “2020, not a good year” and then I laugh and smile back at him.

He comes back five minutes later with a 2016 cab sav (on the right) hoping that I like that better.

My comedy is wasted on these people.

Frames from Singapore

Four year old just now at our Singapore hotel as we’re getting ready to go to Singapre airport: I don’t want to eat here, I want to eat at ‘the club at the airport’.

Someone’s enjoying her dad’s Platinum status a bit too much.

Luna calls cable cars “plane trains” and honestly, that’s a much better name.

When we took the kids overseas everyone told us to make sure we look after them …

Hello, Qantas my old friend

Entering the Paul Kelly stage of our Europe adventure …

Arriverderci, au revoir, aufwiedersen, hasta la vista. Yeah, every fucking city’s just the same.

CDG ✈️ LHR ✈️ SIN

We’re packing and getting ready for our homeward journey tonight in Paris. We’ve got three flights left, and the longest ones just earned us a text message from Qantas letting us know that the four of us had been upgraded to business class (RIP my points balance). We’ve got a few nights in Singapore left and it’s back to the Southern Gold Coast after almost a year away.

So because I’m a big nerd, these are our family travel stats since we left home last September and listed our home on Airbnb:

• Photos on my phone: 10,017
• Days away from home: 354
• Flight hours: 87
• Airbnbs and hotel rooms: 52
• Flights: 50
• Airports: 23
• Cars (rented/borrowed/owned): 17
• Countries: 10
• Boats: 3
• Children: 2
• Eurostars: 1
• MacBooks that survived a glass of whisky being spilt on them: 0
• Brown hairs left on my head: -6

Michael A. Fletcher reports for ESPN that the real life story behind the Sandra Bullock movie, The Blind Side, was based on a lie.

Retired NFL star Michael Oher, whose supposed adoption out of grinding poverty by a wealthy, white family was immortalized in the 2009 movie “The Blind Side,” petitioned a Tennessee court Monday with allegations that a central element of the story was a lie concocted by the family to enrich itself at his expense.

Every day I think about the fact that so much Of our culture today is built on lies. Where do we go as a people? Do we lean in to it or revolt?

I walked out of the house this morning and a man was urinating onto the street, facing in my direction, two metres away. I called out that he was disgusting and he stared at me in the eyes.

After riding a scooter across town to a store I walked upon a lady on the street bent over and attending to her monthly needs.

Just now walking to the grocery store I witnessed a man with both hands amputated smoking a cigarette, his two arms acting as two fingers.

The Parisians have really left their mark on me today.

Richard Rohr in Things Hidden:

It is amazing how religion has turned this biblical idea of faith around to mean its exact opposite: into a tradition of certain knowing, presumed predictability and complete assurance about whom God likes and whom God does not like.

We have 48 hours left in Paris. I’m I’m curious what your one awesome thing to do, see, eat, or photograph in Paris. We travel slow, don’t travel like tourists, don’t really hit the common “top 10 things to see” lists, and we’re travelling with two kids, so sometimes we miss things that everyone thinks is awesome. Give me your one recommendation.

I think I’ve spent too much time in Paris this year.

I just got into an argument with another dad about which Parisian playground is the best one.

The American fool thinks the Lourve playground is the best.

Bearly made it home last night

Another chapter in the ever-growing story of how I interact with, and use, social media:

I wrote a little while ago about choosing two social networks.

I kind of have, Mastodon and Threads/Instagram/Facebook. By which I mean that the Meta platforms all blur together with crossposting and attention.

That leaves my remaining accounts from the tier list, Facebook Page, LinkedIn, and Twitter/X.

Rather than delete them, like I’d rather, I’ve trialled throwing them to ChatGPT.

I’m still refining the prompt, but here’s what I’m asking ChatGPT 4 to do in a Zapier zap:

It starts with an instruction, or a set up which looks like this …

You are a content producer for Josh Withers the Australian wedding celebrant, a marriage celebrant famous worldwide for creating epic marriage ceremonies for adventurous people. You believe that the best kind of marriage ceremony and wedding is an intentional one, where everyone invited is invited for a reason and with a purpose, and that everything that happens at the wedding happens with intentionality and purpose. You are not necessarily against wedding traditions but you are against wedding traditions for the sake of wedding traditions. You write and speak in Australian English, and in a classic and timeless nature but with the wit and humour of Australian marriage celebrant Josh Withers. Be funny. When talking about weddings use inclusive language, use bride only if you’re talking about a female person getting married, not as the title of the wedding industry client, and explore a diverse range of topics, cultures, and kinds of people that could get married.

Then I prompt it to write a post like this …

Write another new controversial tweet as Josh Withers, do not enclose it in quotation marks, written in the style of Australian wedding celebrant Josh Withers based off his writing online and on social media, asking a question or posing an thought about Josh Withers’s wedding planning style. The tweet can be a controversial opinion about a modern, inclusive, intentional style of getting married; or an insight into modern wedding planning; or a reflection on wedding traditions of old and how they don’t matter any more. Designed to illicit engagement and a response from people who see it. Take into account all interviews and responses by Josh Withers Australian wedding celebrant, and everything Josh has written on his online. Keep the message to under 280 characters. Do not start with greetings, do not use Australian slang like “G’day”, do not use any hashtags. Be controversial and talk about all kinds of different wedding topics. Make each tweet different and unique.

There’s a 66% chance of the zap running that every hour, and 50% of the time the content goes to Facebook.

My engagement on these existing platforms has been very low for a long time, so let’s see if this moves the needle. If not, it’s a fun experiment into what a LLM can do for social media.

Just a couple of Australians having a French win. Frame from last night in Paris with yours truly.

Will the Australian government send in an SAS extraction group to save Britt, the girls, and I when France loses to the Matildas in the World Cup quarter-finals today?

Did some A-grade marrying in the rain in Paris today

A Modest Proposal; For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick, by Dr. Jonathan Swift, 1729:

I am assured by our merchants, that a boy or a girl, before twelve years old, is no saleable commodity, and even when they come to this age, they will not yield above three pounds, or three pounds and half a crown at most, on the exchange; which cannot turn to account either to the parents or kingdom, the charge of nutriments and rags having been at least four times that value. I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

I’d forgotten how nice Facebook Paper was. What was the last great UX you experienced?

My daily steps over the past seven months

I think it’s beautiful that the one thing that binds us together as a global community, regardless of colour of skin, religion, where we were born or where we live, or wealth or lack of it, is how our days old street urine all smells the same everywhere.

Resume the conversation

My only regret from my radio career is that I never once said, whilst on air, the line that inspired my career:

Tank fly, boss walk, jam nitty-gritty. You’re listening to the boy from the big bad city. This is jam hot. This is jam hot.

An element of the wedding industry which offends so many inside and out, the part that eventually pushes many insiders out and back into the normal world where couples kissing in front of you all day at work is not normal, is the unreal nature of so many weddings. That for a single day people dress up and play pretend.

I can tell you that although I’ve witnessed it over my fifteen years in the business, I also push back against it at every chance. I’m also lucky that my clientele aren’t indicative of that side of the wedding industry.

Which is why I love film photography. It’s so raw and honest. Often imperfect, and perhaps with error, it’s a plain and simple recording of the light that entered the lens at that time.

So here’s some film photos made by my friend James at the two Italian elopements we had together last week in Tuscany.

Elopements planned by my girl, Britt.

Sari Azout’s “letter to a friend who is thinking of starting something new” is beautiful. As Sari subtitles it, ‘if you are thinking of leaving your job to start a company or passion project, this letter is for you too.’

1. Will you use this opportunity to grow and evolve or will you use it to beat yourself up?
2. How will you avoid insecurity work?
3. Can you learn to enjoy the process as the end in itself, not the means?
4. Can you learn to enjoy the process as the end in itself, not the means?
5. Will you default to the norms of your industry, or will you be an original?
6. What tools will you use to quiet your ego and see reality clearly?
7. Do you have clarity on what kind of financial value you aim to create?

If I had a beef to pick with anyone in the world today it’s how so many of us let life happen to us instead of us making us happen to life.

I hope you get to know your inner world. I hope you thrive financially while living your values. I hope you focus less on what you achieve and more on who you become. I hope you learn to be kind to yourself. I hope you fall in love with the process. I hope you see the point of pursuing passion work is not to drain yourself to create work that eclipses your life, but rather to create a life you are proud of. I hope this new venture takes you far away from conformism and enables you to make a life and a living on your own terms, with your spirit and creativity unhindered.

With any luck you’re reading this article well after I first shared it in August 2023, and if this is the case I felt the need to find the link and send it to you as you consider embarking on something new.

Make this process mean something so we have a cool story to talk about in a decade’s time.

Mimi Sheraton in the New York Times in 1976 telling the story of walking into a KFC with Colonel Harland Sanders:

You’re frying for 12 minutes—that’s six minutes too long. What’s more, your frying fat should have been changed a week ago. That’s the worst fried chicken I’ve ever seen. Let me see your mashed potatoes with gravy, and how do you make them?

The Colonel is paid $200,000 a year to do advertising and PR for KFC, but when asked about Sanders' remarks on the chain’s methods post-sale:

Raw chicken turns customers off, so we play it safe and fry at lower temperatures for a longer time than the colonel likes.

Which is fair, but this plays to my theory on scaling businesses.

When you run a small or micro business, a single storefront, or perhaps a business like Britt and I do with The Elopement Collective, or our Airbnb, or my celebrancy practice. Businesses that are anti-scale can celebrate the JOMO of business, the joy of missing out. We can’t do every elopement, or every wedding, or take every Airbnb booking on the Gold Coast.

Because of our very deliberate JOMO we can chose a different direction for our businesses where we aim to be five our of five stars, or whatever rating system is in play, we just aim to be the best.

Cabel Sasser once tweeted:

I can’t help but feel there’s a wonderful and often unexplored middle ground between “die” and “grow and grow aggressively”

And ever since I read that I’ve been fascinated on that unexplored middle ground.

When you decide to scale you very simply decide not to be the best, but instead to be the biggest, the cheapest, the most-available, and you turn your back on the best.

I remember a small hotel we stayed at in Manhattan once and it proudly boasted a 7.2 rating on one of the hotel review websites which rated hotels out of 10.

If one of our businesses was 72% as good as the best of that category of businesses we’d shut it down, or completely rework it until it was a really good business and bringing immense value to people.

But when you’re just one of the thousands of hotels in New York, maybe 7.2 is ok?

But it’s not ok for me and it wasn’t ok for the Colonel.

Tess McClure in The Guardian reports on Pak ‘n’ Save’s mealbot:

A New Zealand supermarket experimenting with using AI to generate meal plans has seen its app produce some unusual dishes – recommending customers recipes for deadly chlorine gas, “poison bread sandwiches” and mosquito-repellent roast potatoes.

The app, created by supermarket chain Pak ‘n’ Save, was advertised as a way for customers to creatively use up leftovers during the cost of living crisis. It asks users to enter in various ingredients in their homes, and auto-generates a meal plan or recipe, along with cheery commentary. It initially drew attention on social media for some unappealing recipes, including an “oreo vegetable stir-fry”.

We’re in the beautiful age of quality assurance in large language models. The giveaway is that the supermarket responds with:

(we are) disappointed to see “a small minority have tried to use the tool inappropriately and not for its intended purpose

Instead of owning the issue and revealing that the whole thing is built on a house of cards and we’re all just figuring this crap out.

After two months in London, across regional Austria, Liechtenstein, regional Italy, Puglia, and Tuscany, it is so refreshing for my soul to be walking the streets of Paris again tonight.

I could walk the streets of Paris and New York City for the rest of my days and never get bored or lose inspiration.

Why do airlines communicate a flight’s departure time instead of a “be at the gate” time? Every airport and every airline has different timings and many of us live in flight anxiety because of the lack of information.

Is there a good technical reason why departure time is communicated but not gate-deadline time?

Pro tip for flying out of Vienna Airport: you walk past a Starbucks before check-in, and you think, “awesome, a not-Austrian coffee! If there’s Starbucks at check-in there’ll be a Starbucks after security,” but there isn’t.

There is an epic kids playground though.

Over the weekend I wrote a piece about the fluff coming out of commercial radio in Australia, referencing my own time in a commercial radio station in very remote Western Australia, and considering going back last year but the wage had actually decreased.

Anyway, it was poorly written, so sitting at Gate F6 in Vienna Airport just now I edited and fixed it.

Any other errors or omissions are the faulty of your web browser.

Driving from Siena, Italy, to Graz, Austria, today Goldie and I were looking for somewhere to stop for lunch and we decided on this place named after a beach in Los Angeles.

I took Britt’s Fuji X-S10 with the 27mm f/2.8 for a play while we were there.

The PR-wing of the commercial radio community in Australia is getting everyone excited about a new report - that they commissioned and is weirdly in their favour - about how commercial radio in Australia is turning 100 years old this year on November 23rd.

The report tells a compelling story, which I don’t consider to be the actuality of local and regional commercial radio in Australia.

A few takeaways from the report include:

• About three hours of locally significant content per day is broadcast in regional communities - which is pretty much just obeying the law.
• 74% of Australians surveyed answered “sure, why not” when asked if they think commercial radio and audio build a sense of community.
• Over 1/3 of the jobs in commercial radio are in about 1/3 of Australian society (that being, regional Australia).

And it was on the jobs issue I wanted to rebut the argument that Australian radio is “booming”.

It might be easy to try and point out that anyone born in the last 40 years doesn’t know what the antenna on their car is for, or how the Australian commercial radio industry has very poorly stepped foot into podcasting and internet distribution, especially in regards to local and regional content, one of the biggest voids in the sphere of content available today.

But instead I’ll share a personal story that might tell you how booming commercial radio is in regional Australia.

Late 2009 I accepted a role that I was so unqualified for that it was a joke. Twenty-seven years old, with only volunteer broadcast radio experience on my resume, having only even stepped foot in Western Australia once before at the other end of the state in Broome, let alone the small town of Esperance found on the far western side of the Great Australian Bight on Australia’s southern coast, 720 kilometres from the most remote city in the world, a forty hour nonstop drive from home.

The population of over 13,000 people had just shrunk a wee bit after the shock closure of the Ravensthorpe nickel mine in January of that year, but on a freezing cold Saturday morning this young buck who could not name song by The Travelling Wilburys found himself on the corner of Andrew and Demspter Street sitting at an outside broadcast studio in sub-zero temperatures (possibly).

I fell in love with the town of Esperance and its small population. It was a crime that I didn’t know who the Wilburys were considering one of its members had holidayed there, and it was a shame that 14 years on I appreciate the then Radiowest, now Triple M, playlist a lot more than that 27 year old did.

I moved on from that station to Star FM Port Macquarie just over a year later with many great friendships and a much more robust understanding of how to be a leading voice of a local community.

I bring up this anecdote because through COVID things were rough in the wedding industry and Britt and I considered changing many things in our life. One possibility was moving somewhere regional and quiet, somewhere far away, somewhere like Esperance and when the job advert for my old job as breakfast radio host popped up I got in touch. I loved the town and would have cherished the seachange, now with two daughters and now married to the girl I wrote letters to the last time I lived there.

Thirteen years on, with the Esperance population slowly growing, with industry slowly building, and the possibility for remote work in Australia slowly increasing thanks to the NBN and Starlink I thought things might be a little brighter for a modern family moving to the Great Southeast of WA.

• The cost of goods has increased 36% since I last worked in Esperance. If you paid $60,000 for something in 2009 you were paying $86,000 for it now.
• The average wage locally in Esperance (according to the ABS - 2021 to 2006) has increased 65% over (about) the same time period.
• The cost of renting has actually doubled.
• Esperance-Goldfields property purchase prices have increased about 13%.

But the wage on offer for the same job had decreased 7% and was most likely in a smaller team even though it was only a local staff of seven for two radio stations (I was the sole local programming hire) when I was there in 2009. There was the possibility of increasing the wage by also doing radio advertising sales but I’ve proven in the past that an advertising salesperson I am not.

The same role, for a slightly larger audience which would be begging for local stories and content in an ever-globalised content world, was paying $938 a week after tax - $177 more than the minimum wage.

The premise I’m making here is that the very heartbeat of commercial radio is creating a compelling story for an audience and inserting as many ads around that as possible. The fact that a community so bereft of local stories, news, and media personalities cannot support a good wage for someone to fill that role speaks to the weaknesses in the local media market, and the unwillingness of the corporation operating the media to invest there.

I remember a time at Radiowest Esperance where the technology that connects the telephone line to the broadcast console - which was already the simplest of radio technologies, old and very very simple - broke down and there was real deliberation as to whether it should be replaced. I posited the question: are we planning on taking phone calls and broadcasting phone calls and interviews on the radio station in the future? Were phone calls being broadcasted important to the job? I believed they were, but at all levels of management they weren’t sure it was worth it.

A 2009 era iPhone panorama photo of the low-tech Esperance studio

Maybe Esperance was never going to be a profitable radio station, and if so, hand the broadcast license over to a community radio organisation and let the community run it, like they do the fire and ambulance services.

Talking about the Esperance community spirit, we raised thousands (I think it was about $20,000) for the Perth Children’s Hospital when businesses could push their boss off the Tanker Jetty into the subzero Southern Ocean winter waters if they raised or donated $1000. If any community was going to excel at a community radio station it would be Esperance.

If a national commercial radio network can’t afford to pay a local content creator more than $177 a week over the minimum Australian wage to create and broadcast about 24 hours a week of local content by themselves without local assistance, then I cannot believe that commercial radio is soaring in popularity, or even breaking even financially as a business. Instead, commercial radio in Australia sounds like an industry that has ignored advances in civilisation, in communication, in broadcasting, and how societies work in 2023 and is just hanging on by the threads of people who haven’t got CarPlay yet.

Rest in peace, commercial radio. You were my first love, but at one hundred years old maybe it’s time to pass the batten to someone who understands how to be an integral part of a community.

This article has been updated because I’m a better podcaster and radio presenter than writer, plus I’m writing all this on my phone as I travel around Europe and the new autocorrect in the developer beta of iOS 17 is good but buggy

Not everything is forever. Some things are just internet onions.

This website, the-life-and-death-of-an-internet-onion.com, will live from July 26th through August 30th, 2023 — about 5 weeks total, the average lifespan of a non-refrigerated onion. — Laurel Schwulst

It’s beautiful.

The “_______ is typing” dots are unencumbered by the politics of social media because they’re a passive signifier of attention: the tech does it for you, so it’s an unusually honest message that “_______ is alive and mentally present for you.”

Things I can remember:

✅ My couple’s names in a wedding ceremony ❎ Which of my children has which name ❎ My credit card PIN ❎ How old I am? ❎ Which side of the road to drive on in which country I’m in at the moment ❎ Who our insurance is through? ❎ If the h in hola is silent? ✅ The lyrics to Wonderwall

Father of the bride yesterday asked me who’s father I was. I’m now that old.

This is your annual reminder that there is a pager emoji 📟 please don’t forget to use the emoji for all of your pager-themed conversations.

My favourite part of the wedding ceremony is when we show each other our best memes

Things I learned today:

1. When you drive many kilometres past beautiful sunflower fields in Tuscany full of big and ripe sunflowers ready to be in a florist’s shop window, five days later when you go back to photograph them they’ll be harvested and in shop windows.

2. Sunflowers follow the sun, so when you go out to shoot them at sunrise, they’re all looking down like they’ve been listening to Nothing Compares 2 U on repeat since they found out about Sinead.

3. “Sunflowers at sunrise in fog” isn’t the epic photo I hoped for.

I wonder if Mariah Carey ever regretted collaborating with Ol’ Dirty Bastard?

Adi Ignatius inteviewing Karim Lakhani for the Harvard Business Review:

Just as the internet has drastically lowered the cost of information transmission, AI will lower the cost of cognition.

And he comes in with the zinger, which I believe to be true:

What I say to managers, leaders, and workers is: AI is not going to replace humans, but humans with AI are going to replace humans without AI. This is definitely the case for generative AI.

Two applications I used daily in the 90s/2000s but don’t exist today and I haven’t sufficiently found replacements for are MS Money and MS Access.

Thanks for ruining everything, Bill Gates.

For couples that book my David Copperfield package I do a cool magic trick and make your guests disappear.

Take & Leanna this afternoon in Tuscany.

WinRAR

Three years ago today I called for a new Saint to be named in Melbourne. turns out Aussies are super compliant and boring so nothing happened.

Saint Valentine of Rome was martyred on February 14 in AD 269 after he continued marrying people when marriage was banned. Weddings are banned in Melbourne from Thursday. Will there be a Saint of Batmania?

Jake Meador in The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church in The Atlantic:

Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children. Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.

If there was a major crime cast on society in the last generation it was this. The simple idea that professional and financial success reign.

I love my email. Not because I love my email but because due to the swings and round-a-bouts of modern life needing email, and because writers and publications I want to hear from send emails, I’ve figured out how to have an email account that I love. Which according to my friend Steven, isn’t possible. Perhaps it is not dissimilar to training a demon to do the housework.

But one day, I can only hope I am so unimportant, so unneeded, so unplugged from the swings and the round-a-bouts, that I can profess what Don Knuth wrote in the nineties:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address.

His very-90s blog post is seemingly popular for advocating that the hyphen be dropped from e-mail, but I am so inspired to reach the stage of life that Knuth quotes in the post:

`I don’t even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.' – Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker

A former boss told me that as you become more important in a job you start getting more keys, and you seemingly start on a path to have so many keys. Keys to the front door, back door, your office, someone else’s office, the stationary cupboard, the storage room, etc etc.

But then you reach a stage in that job where you are so important that you start handing keys back, and all of a sudden you have no keys.

Being that important sounds lovely, but I’m more excited about being in such a position that my importance in the world is not an ongoing concern. Instead, my friendship, my love, my efforts would be so valuable to my friends and family that none of us would be measuring importance - or likes, views, follows, or subscriptions - but that we would be in that beautiful utopia of just being a friend.

I was today years old when I learned that the word ‘homographic’ didn’t mean what my brain assumed it meant.

homograph - noun each of two or more words spelled the same but not necessarily pronounced the same and having different meanings and origins.

Like the word bass means a fish, an instrument, and a sound range.

Not recorded images or photos of certain people doing things.

50 years of …. celibacy

Doing God’s work over here, keeping the Gold Coast honest about it’s Super Mario koala

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the All Saints sung, “flexing vocabulary runs through my head”. Not, “sex and the vocabulary runs through my head.” Not like I’d thought the latter for the last 26 years or anything.

📷🇮🇹 Siena, Tuscany

For an interesting NASA and Apple-related fall down a rabbit hole, start with the origin of the name of “The Whole Earth Catalog” in 1966, skip forward to 1972 when a whole earth photo was made.

Then take a turn to one of Steve Jobs' favourite sayings “Stay hungry stay foolish” which he quoted in 2005 at Stanford in his famous commencement speech.

Ad then wrap back around to how the whole earth image as an iPhone wallpaper came to be.

Welcome to my brain, where I just think about this stuff.

The BBC has embraced ActivityPub, nice work @BBCRD@social.bbc! I’ve always thought that the long term advantage from a commercial and brand point of view is to be able to say “follow us” and the words that follow are your own brand and your own network.

The power of Mastodon, ActivityPub, the Fediverse, means that the BBC can be on Mastodon, and someone else can be on a completely different platform that supports ActivityPub (like Threads or Micro.blog for example) and you can follow them. For example this very blog, because it’s hosted on Micro.blog means you can follow @hello@joshwithers.blog on your favourite ActivityPub service, like Mastodon, Threads/Tumblr/Flickr one day soon, Pixelfed, or maybe even X if Leon gets his head right, and you can read the blog there. Even WordPress has an official ActivityPub plugin now!

In fact I could imagine that sometime in the future there’ll be a new service that perhaps is more suited to a broadcaster like the BBC and they can transition from Mastodon to it, yet the social graph remains.

When brands and companies operate their own Fediverse instances you can get the updates from your electricity company, you can follow your celebrity or known-person-that-is-a-cool-person and they all get to control their brand and their experience. Instead of mess like this and this.

They are not at Twitter’s, X’s, Meta’s, Google’s or my mercy.

They also are not at the whim of a verification service that is either a secret black box experience, or thousands of dollars a month.

We’re using social.bbc as the domain, so you can be sure these accounts are genuinely from the BBC.

This is the social media future I’d like to see. Where following someone or something is as simple as sending and receiving email.

As a large, high profile, public service organisation, we’ve had to work through a fair number of issues to get this far and we’ve had advice and support from several teams across the BBC. Explaining the federated model can be a challenge as people are much more familiar with the centralised model of ownership. We’ve had to answer questions like “Are we running our own social network?” (well, we’re kind of hosting a small section of a social network) and “Are we hosting a user’s content?” (well, we don’t allow users to create accounts or post from our server, but they can reply to our posts from their own servers, and then their posts will appear next to ours and then they might be stored on our server and it all gets quite complicated).

Does ActivityPub and the Fediverse have issues? Yes. Should that stop us from moving forward and trying to figure it all out? No.

Tuscany for a week or so

Look, all I want to do with my life is make enough money so I can afford to buy Yahoo! which owns AOL which owns Netscape so I can once more have a web browser that has an animated N in the top right again.

Shane Parrish on fs.blog with, Hanlon’s Razor: Not Everyone is Out to Get You, is such an encouraging read today. I was only thinking about how we more often than not think that everyone is looking at us as I was on a beach in Puglia yesterday considering very quickly stripping out of my swimmers into dry pants. I almost did until Britt suggested that everyone would see me. I still wonder whether they would have, and I think not. Most people don’t notice me, don’t see me, and don’t know me. Even less read this blog.

What is Hanlon’s Razor you may ask?

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect.

The fs.blog article stretches the razor out to some real world artefacts:

The media:

Modern media treats outrage as a profitable commodity. This often takes the form of articles which often attribute to malice that which could be easily be explained by incompetence or ignorance.

Not everyone is out to get you.

Years from now the people of Puglia will still talk of the strange man who came from the land down under, where women glow and the men have takeaway American coffee with cold milk. I said, “Do you speak-a my language?” and they just smiled and gave me an espresso with a cold milk drink on the side.

About 20 years ago, somewhere early 2003 from memory, I learned the most important lesson I’d ever been taught in broadcasting and business, from Stan Hillard:

(When you’re broadcasting) imagine the audience are the stupidest people alive, but treat them with the upmost respect.

It’s an axiom employee daily. Assuming the audience doesn’t know the backstory, they don’t know your reasoning or motivation, or they simply haven’t been listening. It’s about inclusivity, with the upmost respect for them.

On a side note, in trying to find where Stan was at today, I stumbled across this piece I wrote for Radio Today ten years ago. Looking back it feels rude at the time but still true today.

I reinstalled the Twitter app when X first appeared just so I could experience this firsthand, in the flesh

Leaving Puglia today and I’m struck by the thought, after having experienced about thirty different international communities and societies over the last year that there is an opportunity cost to every society.

I’ve left every community thinking “this was great, but …” identifying trade-offs and compromises made to build that society.

Like Puglia for example, I love it here, but there’s no breakfast culture. In fact most of the world doesn’t celebrate breakfast like Australians do, and weirdly enough that’s possibly important to me.

Perhaps utopia is impossible because it would simply be the longest list of compromises ever made? Perhaps getting a good breakfast means you have to live in a society where everyone bottles their feelings and pretends to be polite in traffic, as opposed to Italy where you find out how the driver feels straight away but they won’t road rage you?

Is that the price I want to pay for eggs Benedict and a long black with cream?

11:27pm Italy time and I’ve been slogging away for hours at the stupidest CSS thing that changed in the most recent version of the Shopify code. Felt good to feel like it was 1999 and I was a web developer again.

Any how, sugargathered.com is now open for business on Shopify, I’ve just spent the last (far too many months) amount of time moving it from Squarespace and implementing lots of cool things for my friends who run it.

If you want some donuts delivered to, or at an event on, the Gold Coast, I can recommend a great website.

A MacBook with a turntable instead of a keyboard? Shut up and take my money, DJ.

ABC Radio National’s Andrew West interviewing Ian Buruma on in The religious and spiritual ethics of wokeness:

It’s when a movement to improve certain social conditions, whether it’s about race, gender, or whatever else, turns from an active effort into a rigid ideology, then you have a problem.

Ian originally wrote about wokeness in Harpers Magazine:

Writing about “Woke” has at least two pitfalls. One is that any criticism of its excesses provokes accusations of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or white supremacy. The other problem is the word itself, which has been a term of abuse employed by the far right, a battle cry for the progressive left, and an embarrassment to many liberals.

Looking forward to a future where being woke is a clearer idea and status. I’m sick of wondering if I’m a sheeple or a wolk folk, and by who’s definition.

Update on the book writing: I wrote a lot and I thought it was ok, I ran it past some friends and it wasn’t as good as I thought, and on further reflection it was worse.

Then I read this in Stephen King’s On Writing:

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

So I’m currently reading a lot. I used to read a bit, now I’m reading a lot.

A photographer at the water park we were just at asked a family to say “Mozzarella” because I guess formaggio doesn’t make a smile?

In Western Australia yesterday

Amanda Holpuch in the New York Times in June 2023:

South Koreans became a year or two younger on Wednesday after a law standardizing the way the government counts age took effect. There are three common ways to count age in South Korea, but the government has changed its civil code to recognise one: starting from zero on a person’s date of birth and adding a year at each birthday. This is the age-counting method used most often around the world, but it is a departure from the country’s most popular method, often called “Korean age.” Under that system, a person is considered 1 year old at birth, and a year is added to their age each Jan. 1. This meant that an infant born on Dec. 31 was considered 2 years old the next day.

Every extra square metre I experience on this planet I find new and wild ways that humans have figured out how to exist. Korean Age isn’t the weirdest, but it’s up there.

The deeper I traverse into life on Planet Earth, into fatherhood, business, weddings, photography, and friendship I am ever further interested in art, making art, and making great art.

So Matt Ruby’s deviation from his normal comedic quick wit and observation Substack into this interesting read on George Michael, his coming out, connecting Freedom with Wham and his later Freedom ‘90, captured all of my attention today.

This whole read was just really interesting.

Sometimes the clothes, indeed, do not make the man

Uluṟu, that beautiful monolith that captures the very essence of Australia. It’s my favourite place in Australia. This iconic natural wonder is far more than an awe-inspiring spectacle - it represents the rich tapestry of indigenous heritage and gathering for ceremony.

Uluṟu is intrinsically linked with the indigenous Anangu people, serving as an embodiment of their Tjukurpa - a term that captures the moral laws, spirituality, and existence of these people. Uluṟu’s formation stems from a time of ancestral beings, the Dreamtime, whose stories are etched across its vast surface in the form of petroglyphs.

For countless generations, Uluṟu has been a significant ceremonial site, bearing witness to rites of passage and important celebrations. This land, imprinted with the songs and dances of the Anangu, has been a part of their life’s tapestry, from birth to death and every joy and hardship in between.

Now, imagine breathing your marriage into life here - a site resonating with tales of love, life, and dreams, where the deep-red soil has observed centuries of human connection. A marriage ceremony at Uluṟu represents a union not only between two individuals but also a communion with our shared human legacy and the ancient rhythms of this remarkable landscape.

As a wedding celebrant, my commitment at Uluṟu is to ensure that your ceremony encapsulates your story while honouring the deep-seated heritage there. In doing so, we pay tribute to the traditional custodians of this land.

Joining the long line of stories woven into this sacred land, adding our mark to the generations of human experiences that Uluṟu has borne witness to.

Photo by Heart and Colour from Steph & Kieran’s elopement with The Elopement Collective.

Reed Albergotti in Semafor Technology:

Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and the navigation company TomTom released a free mapping dataset in a bid to compete with Google Maps and Apple Maps. Developers can use the data, which includes 59 million places of interest, to create their own navigation products.

If a powerfully simple mapping system like What3Words can’t gain traction in a decade, I don’t think TomTom can get a foot up by giving it away.

I am curious where this leaves Bing Maps though.

Keith Richards, April 1962:

Mick (Jagger) is the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don’t mean maybe.

I’ve been having problems for years where my iPhone would have no space left, yet seemingly actually have space left. I’ve always felt like it was an iCloud photos library problem. So I finally downloaded originals to my Mac and I am now convinced Photos is the problem.

📷🇮🇹🏊🏼 Luna looking like she’s not having fun in the water when she’s truly having a ball.

Lefineder:

The English, said Sir John Fortescue (c. 1470), “drink no water, unless at certain times upon religious score, or by way of doing penance.”, looking at reconstructions of beer consumption from the middle ages to the pre-industrial era this was only a slight exaggeration. When estimating consumption from the amount of beer provided to soldiers, convicts, and workers or reconstructing consumption from tax revenues on beer we see that the average person consumed about a liter of beer a day, this is around four times as much as consumption in modern beer-drinking countries.

Better times, ya know

Do I get my eye scanned by Worldcoin when I’m in Paris in two weeks or do I just share my genitalia size here in public instead?

Anthony Agius in The Sizzle

The ATO is cool with scammers ripping off $557m in MyGov identity fraud. A whopping $557m has been stolen off the ATO and people entitled to a tax refund by scammers in the last two years.

If the Aussie Tax Office is ok losing half a billion dollars, I’ve just realised that I have spent about that on uniform laundry last year.

Reflecting on Matt Mullenweg ten years ago reflecting on Steve Jobs/Apple’s courage to release products, I’ve been on an early morning walk down memory lane - perhaps because I woke very early and the kids are still asleep - thinking about my first few weeks with a drone camera, the original DJI Mavic Pro. It was delivered on the 28th of April 2017. I was fresh off a red eye flight from a Perth wedding the day before and straight out the door to a Tenterfield wedding that afternoon. Britt came for the drive and we put the drone up at the Airbnb.

I didn’t read a manual, or the civil aviation guides. I just turned it on and thought I’d see what it did.

I didn’t know about aperture (or lack thereof in the original Mavic), ISO, white balance, or shooting in RAW.

I just put it up in the air, mashed my fingers into the remote control, and started creating.

It always has been and always will be not only my first camera, but my favourite camera.

I’ve crashed a few drones, thank god for great insurance and DJI Care, lost one into a wave, and another into Queensland’s Great Sandy Bay. I’ve even had one fly away in Iceland due to magnetic interference!

Since these early photos - seriously, all a fluke that they’re ok photos - I’ve been so blessed to have my work experienced by so many. 24 million views on Pexels, 201 million on Unsplash, commissioned work in a handful of places like the Sydney Reece showroom or the Hilton Gold Coast boardroom, and in a gallery in London.

I’ve got my own fine art prints gallery online that’s sold about three photos, and the commissions I’ve received have probably covered the cost of the drones I’ve purchased, but regardless it brings me so much joy.

I hope my photos over the last six years have meant something to you. It makes me smile looking back at these first few photos. I had no idea what I was doing, I was just making.

Matt Mullenweg on Apple and 1.0 products back in 2010:

Many entrepreneurs idolize Steve Jobs. He’s such a perfectionist, they say. Nothing leaves the doors of 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino without a polish and finish that makes geeks everywhere drool. No compromise! I like Apple for the opposite reason: they’re not afraid of getting a rudimentary 1.0 out into the world.

This has rocked my day. Re is its own word. It’s not short for regarding.

One of my most-used and favourite apps is Flighty, and they’ve just announced a new version that’s basically a frequent flyer’s private social network. I love it!

Flighty 3.0 is the new way to share your flying with family and friends. Keep track of your loved ones, not flight numbers. Another industry-first from Flighty.

1. Flighty Friends - Connect with family and friends once, then you can see each other trips and get alerts — automatically and ongoing. You’ll see them on your map, can choose alerts levels, and can stop sharing anytime.
2. Group Trip Ready - Your flights and friend’s flights appear together in the new Today view. Everyone’s live ETA and status make group trips easy.
3. Friends Names in Flight Alerts - Now with name, photo, and custom controls per person to avoid notification fatigue.
4. Trip Sharing - Send multiple flights at once. Receivers can add them to Flighty, or simply view them in their browser.
5. Whose Flight is That? - See who’s on each flight in your flight list, on the map, and including their seat number if you’re sharing a plane.

Add me as a friend on Flighty, yo!

P.S.: Flighty is one of the very few iPhone apps I use on the regular which was quick to allow it’s app to be used on Apple silicon Macs, something more developers should consider enabling.

Imagine being the butt of this line in a news report “The launch of the eye-scanning cryptocurrency project Worldcoin” and you’re also the guy standing behind the main brand name related to a technology the world is shit scared of, and just thinking everything is fine.

Matt Levine on “Leon Smuk”, from X:

I guess my question is, what was he paying for? Musk didn’t want Twitter for its employees (whom he fired) or its code (which he trashes regularly) or its brand (which he abandoned) or its most dedicated users (whom he is working to drive away); he just wanted an entirely different Twitter-like service. Surely he could have built that for less than $44 billion? Mark Zuckerberg did!

I’m looking for an erratic egotistical billionaire to trust my savings and family’s future to, if you can recommend anyone, slip into my DMs

In a story on the book ‘Welcome to Sex’, Amy Remeikis writes in The Guardian:

The response to a sex education and consent book which was removed from the shelves of Big W stores shows how far Australia still has to go on sex education, a Senate committee inquiry has heard. Welcome to Sex, co-authored by the former Dolly Doctor and adolescent health expert Dr Melissa Kang and feminist writer Yumi Stynes, became the target of an online protest campaign. The book was pulled from shelves at Big W after staff members were abused.

I’m fairly done with the constant outrage in society today, the idea that we just need to be upset all day every day. It keeps journalists employed and right wing activist social media groups active. But I will say, I don’t want Luna or Goldie to stumble across this book in a bookstore without me there to guide them.

I have a theory that the problem with modern Australian society is that continue outsourcing jobs that families, humans, friends and partners should be doing. An example is there’s a guy in a Facebook group today hiring people to be friends with disabled kids and it’s NDIS funded. We’ve outsourced friendship to the Commonwealth. Even in COVID most didn’t understand that the reasons for the lockdowns and border closures is because we have outsourced out community wellbeing to the state, so their undertaking of the ‘contract’ is to minimise expenses.

As it is with this book, it’s a vendor looking to win the contract for the outsourcing of your parenting.

My worldview is that there are matters for the home, for the community, for the family, to deal with, fix, entertain, talk about.

An example is my controversial opinion that I don’t like abortion. I have no problem with liberal/progressive abortion laws, it’s good for it to be regulated and I don’t think people are just out there aborting babies like it’s a fun pastime, but ultimately - in my utopian vision for the world - I’d like to see no abortion. Instead as someone is presented with the crossroads where they would consider an abortion the community would help. If money was required, they’d help. If the baby needed parenting, we’d help. That there would be a personalised, tailored solution, involving community and family compromise that resulted in the baby being born and being loved. I’m aware that my utopia does not exist, but that’s just where I’d like to see society be. No need to @ me, I know that rape exists, there are medical quandaries, and sex protection doesn’t always work, but I’d really simply, almost blindly stupidly just love to see babies be born and be loved. It’s like a one in 400 billion chance that a baby would ever be born, I just don’t want to squander it.

So I have my utopian vision, and it’s about communities and families taking it upon themselves to care for and love the ones within. Of course Police and governance has its place, but we should take more responsibility in the home and in the community. If I see someone litter I call them out on it, and if they’re not there I pick the rubbish up and put it in the bin, that’s me.

So, back to the book.

The main problem I see with the book is that I don’t want my girls to pick it up, if I liked the books message, I would bring it to them. But the other problem in the story today is with the linking of the book and consent. It’s a long shot. Consent is important, should be deeply known, understood and respected by all people.

Chanel Contos, the founder of Teach us Consent, echoed those concerns. “Young people are learning about sex from pornography, which – a phrase I always use is that is basically like learning how to drive a car by watching Formula One,” Contos said.

If children are learning about sex from pornography - I’ll humbly admit that was my early “education”, not due to my own wants but a severe lack of parental input and presence (thanks mum and dad, didn’t mess me up at all) - the answer isn’t to put a children’s book about sex on shelves. Sure, make it available as a resource to parents who want to engage with that resource when they are ready to, but the gaping hole in Australian society today isn’t lack of resource, it’s leadership from parents, or as I like to call it: parenting.

Australians are parenting less and less. I can talk about this from my own experience, my mother walked out when I was five, my step-mother didn’t really like me, and my father worked often two to three jobs.

A former Channel V host should not have to parent my children, I don’t want Woolworths Group to parent my children, I want close to zero of the community group that identifies as politicians to parent my children, and regardless of education choices anyone makes the educators are not parenting our kids.

Parents need to parent. Families and communities need to step up. Parents are not the kids best mates. Parents are not caregivers or landlords. Parents are leaders, leading their kids from birth to greatness - of course that greatness does include a deep and loving understanding and respect of other people’s consent, and also an understanding of the concepts of sex, intercourse, dating, courting, etc.

We have a set of boundaries with our kids that we will not lie to them, we will not lead them astray, but we’ll also respect their need to play, rest, and learn at their speed.

I’ll let them learn about scissoring when their fragile-because-of-age minds can fully understand what it means. Not when they pick it up off a shelf in a book shop next to Paw Patrol.

I welcome resources like Welcome to Sex being made available as a resource for parents to introduce to children when they deem so, but please make a space in society for parents to parent their children in their own unique way. Don’t force our hands. We don’t live in a single-speed society. Our lives have a transmission, everyone’s driving at different speeds at different revs using different gears, on different roads, needing to operate at different gears. Making a book this graphic and forward available for my child to just to pick up isn’t the way.

Create space for parents to lead their children, and maybe they will?

📷🇮🇹 Our last Monday in Puglia

📚 After backing and reading Renai Le May’s The Frustrated State it felt like Australian governments had completed, achieved the highest level of information technology incompetence. COVID proved me so very wrong, but then today Anthony Agius writes in The Sizzle:

Services Australia has cancelled a project to create a calculator for Centrelink entitlements, after spending $191m on it over 3 years. Incredible incompetency for such a basic thing the government needs.

How many millions of dollars can the Australian government flush until we actually get real upset?

When people talk about how the 80s were better I want to remind them that there was a character on TV whose name was Gordon Shumway, called himself Gordon Shumway, but everyone called him ALF because audiences and cast stupidly needed the reminder that the alien looking dude was an alien life form.

This is terrible branding, design, and UX. How am I going to remember where to go to be an insufferable prick now?

I shared this on Facebook six years ago, on July 24, 2017:

Something you probably don’t realise when you ask me to be your celebrant is that in celebrating your marriage, you’re gleaning a little from mine. As I prep for your ceremony I’m taking notes on you both and your definitions of marriage,m although the foundation of my belief of what marriage is and what it looks like in real life starts at home. So with that said, I ought share some personal news about our marriage. For almost five years Britt and I have been trying to fall pregnant, so today we took the next step and our doctor extracted 13 eggs from Britt so we could get some third party assistance in that area.

How cute is it that while you’re under general anaesthetic they scribble the extraction number on your hand like you’re tattooing your BFF with a biro in high school. Life doesn’t always go as you plan, that’s the beauty of marriage - it’s the two of you together forever regardless of how well the plan’s going, or not. And because of that union, we know, that the best is yet to come.

Here’s an update on those thirteen eggs today.

Michael Bierut:

No one will remember that it was on time, everyone will remember that it was bad.

Starting to feel a little bit alone over here in Italy. Trying to get some Aussie work done and it looks like Telstra cuts you off from WiFi calling after your SIM card hasn’t been on an Australian Telstra tower for seven months. Google Fi was three months.

A birds eye view of Martina Franca, in southern Puglia, where we’ve been hanging out this month.

In these photos, happening at the same time, is a funeral procession, a dance contest, and an opera, amongst whatever else the 49,000 residents are getting up to.

There’s also two 360 photos of Martina Franca in this embed, a higher and lower shot, look for the hotspots when you’re scrolling around.

Three former employees of The Knot have blown thy whitsle. Jennifer Croom Davidson, former Global Fashion Director; Rachel LaFera, former Director of Fine Jewelry; and Cindy Croom Elley, former Account Executive at The Knot, have since left, are out from under NDA, and they’re truth-telling about one of the world’s largest wedding industry companies: The Knot Worldwide.

The Knot Worldwide is the current name of the parent company of WeddingWire, The Knot, The Bump, Hitched (which formerly had a presence in Australia, and disclosure, yours truly was a paid writer for them), a series of localised wedding directory websites through The Americas and Europe, and the Real Weddings TV show. They started as an AOL channel in 1996 and went to the open web in ‘97, and just before the dot com bubble burst they raised $35 million in their first IPO.

Since then lots of corporate shit has occurred, most of which bores me as someone who prefers to be on the “tools” in the wedding industry, not in the C-suite, but the trio dropped the bomb on The Lioness in an extremely detailed expose revealing that advertisers don’t get what they’re paying for and the whole business is terribly run.

This internal chatter among The Knot Worldwide’s customers is confirmed by looking at currently available web review sites; to this day, you can see complaints of contracts unfulfilled and impossible to get out of, and torrents of fake and spam leads. A recent Business Insider article also reveals that things are still amiss, reporting that 70–80 percent of the company’s leads are scams and that little to no inbound results from their advertising.

PetaPixel sums it up well:

Whistleblowers within the company say the supposed “swindling” issues began with vendors who purchased premium ads with the promise of generating new client leads, but instead were delivered spam content and even lost rankings within The Knot’s own ad-based search results.

The enshittification of the internet spares no person and knows no bounds. It is sad to see one of the few companies that made it through the dot com bubble to be revealed as rotten.

I’ve just finished reading Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution by P. W. Singer, recommended by my favourite Cybersecurity Guard, @qldnick 📚

It was a compelling and enjoyable read, and honestly, a refreshingly human conclusion that somewhat settles its disturbing and frightening chorus of a society a few years ahead of where we are today struggling with the effects of advancing technology.

Never go into battle with a bot you can’t trust and never trust a bot you don’t know how to snuff out.

The largest truth in this fictional read is that fear always takes the wheel, especially for those who have apparently been listening to the guy who said not to fear.

This is Luna, pitching you her idea for her new TV show. If you are a TV producer, Luna would like to sit down and talk about you buying the rights to her show.

Please, no tyre-kickers.

Love will save the day

📷🇮🇹🚁 Fifteen of Monopoli’s best from my Mavic in Puglia yesterday

📷🇮🇹🏖️ Torre Canne, Puglia

One day we’ll have to explain to our grandkids that we all dressed daggy now because of Elon Musk.

Big news crew, new gender droppin

Doing the right thing is always the right thing

⛪️ I did it, I finally did it. I crucified the sun.

… and other photos from the sunset over Monopoli, Puglia, this afternoon 📷🌇🇮🇹

This might be a silly question for an old nerd to ask, but for those that know the answer, why is the book he famously write in prison, ‘The Fugitive Game: Online with Kevin Mitnick’, not really listed as a book by him on his website etc? Also, the only eBook version I can find is on Kindle. Why?!

Derek Sivers in The past is not true:

Aim a laser pointer at the moon, then move your hand the tiniest bit, and it’ll move a thousand miles at the other end. The tiniest misunderstanding long ago, amplified through time, leads to piles of misunderstandings in the present. We think of the past like it’s a physical fact - like it’s real. But the past is what we call our memory and stories about it. Imperfect memories, and stories built on one interpretation of incomplete information. That’s “the past”.

No matter how hard they try, the modern web can’t escape Wordpress.

📷🇮🇹🏖️ Family day at the beach at Cala Maka. The beach is apparently/allegedly called Torre Canne Nord Prima della Casa Grigia, which translated from Italian means, North Canne Tower Before the Gray House, which is the most romantic beach name I’ve ever read.

Good luck ever naming a beach better than that.

I shared these words from Craig Mod a year ago today. But since then we made the choice to uproot our life in Australia, move to Mexico, then leave Mexico, travel around the USA and Europe for a while, and come home to Australia in a month’s time.

I can guarantee I’m coming home changed, but like Craig, I’m also more confused than ever about why some people travel. I mean no judgement towards any of you, but I’ve been in Italy for a month now and it seems such a waste to leave in a few weeks. Even considering my feeling that I’ve barely seen or experienced anything, I still have a deeply resonating feeling that I’m selfishly taking in the culture here, and to do what with it? Just to give the girls a childhood photo album that was cooler than mine?

The romantic ideal of travel is to leave as one version of yourself and return another, changed, ‘better’ version of yourself. This trip changed me, but not in the ways you might classically expect. I’ve returned suspicious of travel, more confused than ever about why so many people travel. Unsure if most travel of the last few decades makes sense, or has ever made sense or justified the cost. It feels like some consumerist, uncurious notion of travel was seeded long ago and, like a zombie fungus, has mind-controlled everyone to four specific canals in Venice. To a single painting at the Louvre. To three streets and a square in Manhattan. To a few rickety back alleys around Gion. An eminently photogenic set of torii in Kyoto.

Regardless of my, and Craig’s, trepidations of travel being an unjustified expense or impact, I’m forever changed by 2020-2022’s travel-related traumas and 2023’s travel adventure.

Just going on the record for everyone who asks where we are, where we’re living now, and if we’re ever coming home to Australia: we’re in Italy then Paris and Singapore between now and getting home to the Gold Coast late August.

I’m back to work and at your service making weddings and elopements from August 22, 2023.

I’ve got travel around Australia and New Zealand for weddings and elopements through the end of this year and early next year before we head back to Europe in 2024.

I’ve also had some requests for the USA if you’re interested in having me there too.

June, July, and August 2024 for weddings and also elopements with The Elopement Collective and some of our team including Jason Corroto, House of Love Weddings, George Bowden, House Of Lucie, and Pearce Brennan.

Finally, I wanted to address something a few people have lovingly brought to my attention “I thought you only did elopements”.

I might be married to the @elopementcollective’s boss, but I create ceremony for all and sundry. Big weddings, small weddings, elopements, and corporate events as a master of ceremonies. As the band was named, I do weddings, parties, anything.

So very formerly: I do weddings as well. If you know someone getting married somewhere in the world and you reckon we’d be a fit, let them know I exist!

I think this would be an awesome idea: a mashup of a reddit-like voting system with events calendar and geotagging plus some Atlas Obscura.

Basically a “cool things near me and/or happening near me soon” web app.

Will the 2026 Commonwealth Games, originally supposed to be in Victoria, Australia, be the first ones to test the “Vancouver should be the permanent Olympic Games city” that Jonathan Fischer reignited seven years ago in Slate, of course but for the Olympic’s little sibling, the Comm' Games:

That’s why the Olympics should relocate to a city that won’t just relieve the rest of the world of hosting duties for the Summer Games but of the Winter Games, too. It would have to be a place with the right climate. It would have to be a place that could afford it. It should possess something of an international flavour. It should have a proven track record. It should be located in a democratic country but not a hegemonic one. It should be Vancouver.

📷🇮🇹 40 degrees celsius today in Martina Franca, but the second you step into the shade the temperature drops about fifteen of those bad boy degrees.

Thought I would check on the two-year-old before going to bed …

A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace:

Closed Fiefdoms of the platform world, you weary giants of stocks and small talk, I come from the Pluriverse, the new home of the Heart. On behalf of the future, I invite you to join us.

Apparently, it’s wise to let people know you have things available if you indeed do have things available … which I have neglected to do about my piece “South o' Talle” being licensed to Priints in London. It looks great on walls if you have any, any walls that is.

I really like the tiny awards

Much gratitude to @Mtt for designing a really nice and extremely useful Micro.Blog theme in Tiny Theme. I woke up this morning with a blog refresh on my mind, and the theme is great + he’s been so helpful! In addition, thanks to @vincent for Tinylytics bringing the stats and click-kudos to my blog.

I feel like not a day goes by that I don’t witness an even more Italian thing than I had witnessed previously. Today’s most Italian thing I’ve ever witnessed is an Italian driver beeping at a parked Italian ambulance to get out of the way as the medics attend to someone.

It’s always easy to differentiate Italians and tourists on the streets of Puglia. Italians are in the street yelling at each other, tourists are in the streets scrolling.

📷🇮🇹 Alberobello, Puglia

Looks like Canon is doing five blades

Aliens have come to Australia. When they ask for our leader, who do we call? Chuck, Albo, Sandilands, or Murdoch?

📷🇮🇹 Polignano a Mare, Puglia

Wild times back in the forties

Diver

Swimming in the ocean and in ocean caves with your four year old is a workout right?

This week ahead sees the Australian celebrancy movement celebrate its 50th anniversary.

50 years ago 0% of Australian weddings were lead by a civil celebrant, today over 80% are. And the entire movement has driven the Australian wedding industry forward to a point where we lead the world’s wedding industry in product, service, brand, professionalism, and creativity.

For a movement that’s grown from Canberra to the world, thank you Lionel Murphy, Lois D’Arcy, and my celebrant colleagues for making a way for me to make a job that takes me aroundd the world.

Read my whole article on the Celebrant Institute website.

I sure hope these peeps who make somewhere between $150,000 USD to multiple millions a year are going to be financially ok through this strike.

If I can be really frank, does anyone else “have parents” but honestly really doesn’t have parents relationally/socially/spiritually and when you have a down moment in life you just feel super alone? Or is this just adulthood? Or do other relational orphans just develop thicker skin?

Italian kids get way more realistic puzzles than Aussie kids

The most terrifying thing I’ve seen in Italy so far was ten Italian youths aged around 12 years old loudly chanting “gay!” and aggressively geaturing in a way that was a little bit too familiar for this Sarina High School alumni, taunting this young lad who was just laughing in their face!

He’s either gay and joyfully proud, or not gay and impervious to the bullying that brought earlier generations to their knees.

My favourite/least-favourite thing to do when travelling Italy is go to these million year old classical Italian osterias (restaurants) run by the village’s most heralded humans, and ask for takeaway.

The first reaction from the staff is a blank look on their face, as if I’ve just asked them to murder the weakest member of the wait staff.

The second thing they do is ask permission from someone in a back room. I assume it’s the pope.

The third is agree then go searching for takeaway boxes or dishes. I’ve seen them run across the road and get some.

Finally, after all this I’ll ask for a glass of vino “while I wait” and the same thing happens every time. The young wait staff member comes back and explains that they can’t do takeaway glasses of wine.

I just wish I could explain to them that we’re dispassionate about disciplining our two and four year olds in restaurants and the world’s just a nicer place if we takeaway.

But thanks to the magic of Apple Translate and hand gestures we get there in the end.

Does anyone else have weird iPhone storage glitches? I’ve had this problem for the last maybe 4-5 years where my iPhone doesn’t actually know how much storage it has. I’ve been on a 256GB iPhone for a while now, and Apple Store staff have asked me to backup and restore, I’ve even started on new installs recently.

The only thing that normally fixes it is doing a backup to my Mac.

My gut feeling tells me that there was a time maybe 4-5 years ago where I was loading in RAW images from my camera into iCloud Photo Library and editing with RAW Power and I reckon that they’re stuck in the iCloud/phone storage jungle.

My Mac’s Photos library also has this weird thing where it picks 1 or 2 photos that it allegedly cannot upload to the cloud, yet it actually originally got that photo from the cloud (it was uploaded on my phone), and the photo is still in the cloud.

I’m semi-tempted to burn this 20-year-old .mac/MobileMe/iCloud account to the ground, export everything, and start again. It feels like there’s always something small that could be buggy happening … or is that just how iCloud feels for everyone?

The most fascinating, whilst also overwhelming, experience in travel, especially when you undertake it for more than a weekend is ‘noticing’.

Almost every time I notice something I think about what Steve Jobs once said:

“When you are a stranger in a place, you notice things that you rapidly stop noticing when you become familiar.”

I sincerely love being a stranger. I think that’s a common thread in my life, that when I become too known I feel uncomfortable. I feel very comfortable being a stranger in a strange place and rather too uncomfortable being at home.

I hope I can give my kids the upbringing that would help them feel the complete opposite, but still curious about the world, still desiring to be strangers in a strange place, noticing.

I think I just accidentally haggled with a vendor in an Italian street market. I thought the fruit cost less than five euros, I gave him five euro., he looked at me and giggled, winked, and points his finger at me and took the money and gave me no change. Is that what haggling is? I’m good at life.

When I first went into self-employment over a decade ago now I set up templates for common or transactional emails and I was always aware that I didn’t want an email not from me, yet from me, to not sound like I had sat down and written the letter.

So I used to write the automated emails from our cat, Stevie.

Stevie is no longer with us, her liver went south, but she lives on as of this week. I’ve replaced all of our automated emails with ChatGPT-generated emails and yet messages written by Stevie AI. Seeing what ChatGPT/Stevie is writing is amazing and hilarious and really good.

Consider that my teaser to enquire with me for your wedding, that a cat will send you emails.

You’ve heard the phrase “Content is King”, coined by Sumner Redstone - the old rich white person behind CBS, Viacom, Paramount, MTV, Comedy Central etc who passed in 2020 - but Bill Gates popularised the idea for the internet back in January of 1996. It’s so beautiful and odd to read this essay 27 years on.

But to be successful online, a magazine can’t just take what it has in print and move it to the electronic realm. There isn’t enough depth or interactivity in print content to overcome the drawbacks of the online medium.

15 years of the Apple App Store and my first purchases are realllll nerdy

I’ve been featured in all the great newspapers around the world, the New York Times was one of the coolest. But none felt as good as having one of my photos printed six years ago in the newspaper I read as a young adult, the newspaper I got it earliest jobs from by reading the classifieds.

Why the rush to 5G?

On a per user basis, a 5G network is cheaper to operate than a 4G one. The technology is easier to maintain and more reliable. It’s not sexy. That’s something that is hard to sell to consumers, but makes a huge difference to telcos. There’s much more to this. The additional capacity may not be a pressing matter in New Zealand right now, but in time there will be more connections and 5G gives carriers headroom to cope with future demand. There may be future apps that can use the speed.

Jiddu Krishnamurti:

The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.

“For everything there is a place but that of wonders is just a little more hidden…”

📷🇮🇹 We went for a drive to the little village of Ostuni today and unknowingly stumbled upon a Dolce & Gabbana fashion show. We didn’t stick around to watch the beautiful people be beautiful, but we saw the rich people trying to get into the town we were leaving.

📷🇮🇹 Sunday frames from Martina Franca, Puglia, Italy

Threads, compared to Mastodon and BlueSky, is the difference between an idea and a product.

When Steve Jobs saw the graphical user interface with a mouse at PARC, it was an idea. Apple made it a product.

Mastodon and Bluesky are powerful and beautiful ideologies. Threads is a good product.

Apple Photos face detection software needs a “tell me the date and location of that photo” button when asking which of your daughters it is if the photo is of an infant.

Programmed a Zapier zap to get ChatGPT to reply to my website wedding enquiries with an email and a text message in the form of our deceased cat reincarnated as AI. My AI assistant refers to me as “Joshy”.

Pretty much me

Can I share a weird thing that has haunted me for over a decade now? Yoko Ono followed me on Twitter 10 years ago and I forgot to follow her back. Has it been too long?

PJ Vogt’s new podcast helps me feel better about my deep desire to drink coffee mid-flight. Do you drink airline coffee?

One of my great loves in this world is the format and medium of audio storytelling. First radio, then podcasting, it’s one of the most beautiful ways to tell a story.

So it’s pretty cool to wish the modern medium of podcasting a 20th birthday this weekend. Thank you to @podnews for the writeup.

The girls say they’ll catch us dinner tonight. I’m googling pizzerias.

I think about the Malcolm Gladwell book ‘Talking to Strangers’ every day

We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy.

Today I’m thinking about it in context to Threads by Instagram and how the hot takes are flying about how it’s absolutely going to succeed or absolutely going to fail.

Make room for the nuanced, complex, enigmas.

My day job is to stand in between people on their wedding day and make them smile then kiss. It’s not a bad gig tbh.

Yesterday in Puglia, Italy, with Casey and Rob.

Planned by The Elopement Collective and photographed by Pearce Brennan at Masseria Grieco in Ostuni.

Cory Doctorow was on the ABC talking about enshittification and it was beautiful. Must listen audio/radio.

Advice I read recently said “Social networks: choose two” and I can’t drop the feeling that it’s quite sage. In the overwhelm and the overbearing influx of social media content and the greater network of services there I’ve almost chosen zero instead of two, which isn’t any better than the fifteen or so you can choose from today.

I feel like today I live in between the rock of exposure and engagement and the hard place of privacy. I’ve moved so far away from Google and Meta properties to avoid the leakage of private data and my contribution to their share price, and moved toward the open web, privacy-respecting social media, and I feel really good about it - but barely anyone else in my network cares. I’m still surprised when I see intelligent friends using Twitter as if it’s the kind of bar people like us would show our faces.

Seeing the launch of Instagram/Meta’s new Twitter doppelganger, Threads, is encouraging this week as the project lead, Adam Mosseri is seemingly committed to open-web philosophies:

“We’re committed to building support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, into this app. We weren’t able to finish it for launch given a number of complications that come along with a decentralized network, but it’s coming. If you’re wondering why this matters, here’s a reason: you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.”

Being open also enables you to “choose two.”

Here’s how I currently “social media” (Spoiler: this is more media and less social):

Anything I want to share with the world starts here on my micro.blog, which serves a few purposes.

1. Firstly it shares my stories with my micro.blog community, and they’re a great bunch of people. A good portion of them are people who - like me - backed Manton’s Kickstarter for the whole idea, and the rest are people who went searching for a cool glass of water in the internet desert.
2. Secondly, my micro blogs actually post to my own blog, which is hosted by micro.blog but if I ever took issue with the service, the fee, the community, the leadership, or whatever may happen - I can very easily take my content to my own hosting. I could in fact do that today and still remain part of the micro.blog community and use the micro.blog tools. This is the power and the beauty of the open web and decentralised internet services.
3. Finally, micro.blog pushes my content out to a number of other social networks, with the number always growing. Linkedin, Twitter, Mastodon, Medium, and Bluesky, all social networks that I look active on because of micro.blog.

I’ve had broadcasting in my genes for twenty years so that model serves me well. I craft a story, tell the story, and it shares to a few places. Today I’ll then get that story and also take it where micro.blog can’t (because of lack of API), like Facebook, Instagram, and now Threads.

And on a regular day, that’s where it stops. Opening those apps for anything other than broadcasting is such an overwhelming action. I’ve unfollowed thousands of people, but it’s still too much.

But if I had to pick two today, I’d go where I get the most interaction, and that would be the Meta properties and micro.blog. Mastodon, Bluesky. T2, LinkedIn, and Twitter are all graveyards as far as community, for me at least.

I open all the apps on a daily basis and it’s just so rare to feel seen or heard in there. I get more feedback and encouragement via emails from subscribers to my weekly blog email or text messages and conversations with people I love. You can actually publicly see how many people read my blog, and the odd post breaks out, but mostly it’s a group of 10-15 people.

Maybe that’s just the way it’s supposed to be? Maybe we’re not supposed to be on every single social network in existence? It’s just a strange thing for me to come to terms with, the gradual decline from talking to thousands of people a day on the radio, and on stages, through to being on breakfast TV and reality TV, to just being a dad who gets 10 likes on his Facebook post and calls his wife to let her know he’s going viral.

If you’re interested in reading more about micro.blog and the wider open web movement, Manton Reece’s book is great, or at least, will be great when he publishes it and takes it out of draft.

Long live Threads, maybe there’s a chance for a second breath of Twitter-like-wind there.

The shining light in the rubbish pile that is Twitter is the @HelpfulNotes service. There is so much misinformation out there, so many people so keen to share the metaphorical train crash that is the world that they don’t even care if the train crash ever happened.

🎂 This is the official tier list of social networks, all of them, from the beginning of time to July 6, 2023. This list is not to be questioned and is wholly correct, trust me.

👼🏻 God Tier

• IRC
• Vine
• iMessage
• LiveJournal
• Myspace
• MSN Messenger
• ICQ
• Usenet/Google Groups
• Email
• Blogrolls
• Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web (OG Yahoo!)
• phpBB
• Friendster
• micro.blog
• FourSquare
• Digg (version 1 and 2)
• Path

👑 Royalty Tier

• Threads
• Apple eWorld
• Hi5
• Instagram
• Mastodon
• Flickr
• Tumblr
• ActivityPub
• Blogger
• WordPress
• SixDegrees

😶 Adam Sandler Tier (Could take it or leave it)

• Orkut
• Google Wave, Buzz, Shoelace, Friend Connect
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• BBS/Bulletin Board Systems
• Meerkat
• AOL Messenger
• Twitch
• BlueSky
• Snapchat
• YouTube
• Wavelength
• BeReal

🫤 Pleb Tier

• Facebook
• T2
• iTunes Ping
• Orkut
• Google+
• Weibo
• Yahoo! Messenger
• FriendFeed
• App.net
• Periscope
• Fidonet
• Pixelfed
• Discourse

🤮 Would rather eat cat vomit tier

• Twitter
• WhatsApp
• Nostr
• Hive
• Telegram
• Plurk
• Musical.ly
• Bolt
• Bebo
• Yik Yak
• Signal
• Diaspora
• TikTok
• Green bubbles on iMessage
• Post
• Discord
• Reddit
• Swarm
• Pownce
• RenRen
• Weibo
• Parlar
• Truth Social

Shoutout to Bruno Bouchet for the tier grading methodology. All other Tier grades (like the S, A, B, C, F make no sense to me)

🧵

Normalise back to work after a sabbatical photos

First day back at work photos

After being on sabbatical for almost seven months I’m creating a marriage ceremony today.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a break from my day job for this long, I might have fogrgotten what to do.

Any tips for a fresh wedding celebrant?

🏖️ Tuesday at Spiaggia Lido Silvana, Puglia, Italy

🧵 Decentralisocial networks are cool, but you know what’s also cool? Talking to your existing friends group, and having your content enjoyed by people.

Unlike most of my late-2022 and 2023 content which hasn’t been seen by more than 10 to 15 eyes.

Prediction: Threads will win; T2, Bluesky, the others will falter; ActivityPub and Mastodon will be a fun place for niche communities.

Happy America Day

We’ve been in more Airbnb’s this last year than most people, about 35 so far I think. Most hosts mention either in person, or in their review, how it’s unique to travel with our kids (four and two) and how we don’t ask much of them, like how this host mentioned out “autonomy”.

Should we be more needy? Are we too Australian? Honestly, after driving three to five hours with kids the last thing we want to do is talk to an Airbnb host lol.

Remember when we’d suffix names with 2000 to make them feel cool and modern?

2023: when everything has to mean something.

Taylor Swift touring somewhere or not touring somewhere being a political move is wild. She’s not playing Brisbane in Australia because it was too much on her schedule, work-wise, she’s not a robot.

If anyone’s forgotten their password recently I can pick you up a new one when this store opens later today

Italian supermarkets: two aisles worth of pasta, but no rolled oats

Sunday in Puglia

📚 I’ve owned and used a Kindle for over a decade, it had been my favourite gadget for so long. But over the years I started to realise that Amazon wasn’t interested in pushing the platform forward any further and the software wasn’t going to get any better. I even upgraded to the Amazon Kindle Scribe and it was an embarrassingly bad product. The final straw was when Jean-Louis Gassée’s new book, Grateful Geek just didn’t work on any physical Kindle devices, despite Amazon happily selling me a copy.

On the ATP Marco Arment started expressing similar concerns a few weeks/months earlier in 2023 and he did the hard testing and returning work required to convince me to buy a Kobo Libra 2 while I was in Paris in May.

I love this device, it’s my new favourite gadget. But …

• The Kobo store is in a dismal state, and/or, the publishing world is in a dismal state
• The eBook publishing world is run by terrible humans who sometimes charge more for an eBook than a printed book, often release the print book weeks or months before an ebook, and just generally don’t know how to sell a book to people.
• There isn’t a competing ebook marketplace outside of Amazon and Kobo.
• And there’s a chance that the other great feature of Kobo eReaders is going away in Pocket integration, that is, unless Kobo updates its software.

So I’m now left in a weird spot, there are five books I’d like to read and buy, but I can’t buy them for my Kobo. Will anyone sell me a plain old boring ePub?

• MetaChurch by Dave Adamson
• Grateful Geek by Jean-Louis Gassée
• Twilight Eyes by Dean Koontz
• The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami
• Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar

The enshitiffication of the world continues and I guess those books will just sit on my electronic bookshelf waiting for me to figure out how to read them without cutting down another tree or having two ereaders.

Looking for fiction book recommendations. Give me the name and why you think I’ll like it.

Hey Siri, prepare an edit of the Richmond FC players singing So Long, Farewell to Elon Musk.

New month, new locale. Hello, Martina Franca, Puglia.

Over 1000 years old, this sanctuary in Genga’s Frasassi Caves was intended to be a refuge from sinners, but when you see it from a sky, it looks like the church itself is seeking refuge from the world.

The temple you now see was complete in 1827 under the suggestion of Pope Leo XII. For all this time it was called the Temple of Valadier but recent study has revealed that Giuseppe Valadier, its namesake architect, didn’t design it at all.

Either which way, it’s nice to know that Catholic sinners get a cool place to pilgrimage to.

I caught a few moments after the sun set, in between rain clouds, to get the drone up. I’d been driving for 45 minutes and gotten stuck down two dead ends. I was making these photos tonight!

A few other accounts of the sanctuary:

• Atlas Obscura
• My Best Place
• Wikipedia

For the past ten months, my and my family’s non-clothing and non-toiletries life has completely lived inside a Think Tank camera bag and it will do so for another 50 days. I took the opportunity this afternoon to do a quick audit, headcount, and make sure everything I was carrying was necessary, and inspired by the Hemispheric Views podcast segment ‘Rate my desk’ I thought I would submit my ‘desk away from home’ to the internets.

All of our life’s possessions that aren’t our actual home and the furniture in that home required for it to be on Airbnb, lives in our two July ‘Checked Plus’ bags, and two Dagne Dover bags, plus a Phil & Teds travel cot and a Baby Jogger travel pram, and this Think Tank Streetwalker camera bag pictured below.

The reason for the Think Tank Streetwalker bag is that it’s unique in being a carry bag, a backpack, and a roller bag. It’s the Optimus Prime of camera bags.

I’ll guess a few of the questions “What is that?!":

• Panic Playdate
• photocopies of passports and actual passports
• parfum
• new and identical backup sunglasses because the last place you want to be is in a strange new land without your favourite sunglasses
• octopus straps, you never know when you’ll need to strap something to something (same goes for the tape)
• USB-C dock with an ethernet port, because sometimes you just need to plug the damn thing in to get internet
• my eldest daughter’s camera (Nikon Coolpix childproof potato camera)
• my wife’s camera (Fuji X-S10 with a 27mm)
• my splurge camera purchase in Paris (Leica Z2X which means 2x zoom, film camera)
• my flying camera (DJI Mavic 3)
• my camera (Canon EOS R5)
• Native Union universal cable
• supporters gift from the Wedding Photo Hangover podcast
• DJI Mic kit
• MacBook Pro M2, a new addition to the kit after my former M1 MacBook Pro got drunk on a glass of whisky
• Philips OneBlade shaver, the best travel shaver I could find and the only one that has USB charging
• ThruNite torch that takes AA batteries because you can’t leave emergency eyesight to a lithium USB-charged battery
• 35mm f/1.8, 50mm f/1.8, 70-200mm f/2.8
• Anker charger and Britt has one too
• my friend Scotty’s latest book on my Kobo Libra 2 (I’m a recent convert away from Kindle, and love this Kobo!)

Our whole charging strategy is based on IEC C7 (Figure 8) leads and getting local leads wherever we go and they plug into the Anker chargers and the 96W Apple charger. There’s a blog post on my reasoning for this. I’m now a cable dad.

So, rate my desk.

Is the future of TV, radio? Or the future of radio is TV? Either way, it’s almost 7pm and this is what Italians are watching on TV?

The number one indicator that you’re an old dad is when your cables and leads company emails “Let’s Catch Up!” and “We miss you!” as if you’re high school buddies.

As a family we travel with a MacBook Pro, iPad mini, two iPhones, Apple Watch, and a series of things that require either USB-A, USB-C, or micro USB to charge. We’ve chosen gadgets and utilities that are all USB-C, with exceptions where necessary.

My DJI Magic 3 drone batteries need 65W but my current travel charger’s 65W apparently doesn’t quite meet the needs the DJI three-battery USB-C charger, so the 96W Apple original MBP charger does the MacBook and the drone batteries.

For a family of four travelling globally for a year it was hard to figure out the exact right kit, but we got there in the end.

So my worldwide travel solution has been

• two Anker 543 Chargers (65W II), these have two USB-A ports, a USB-C 45W port and a USB-C 20W port
• my original 96W MacBook charger.

Each of these, including the MacBook charger, takes as an input the figure 8 lead. Figure 8 leads, or IEC C7 leads as they’re technically known, are very easy to procure locally, most Airbnb’s even have multiple devices already using them, they’re inexpensive, and they’re small to carry.

So I buy three IEC C7 leads for each region we’re travelling to. If we weren’t on a year long trip I’d hold onto the leads but suitcase space is at a premium. So far I’ve needed four different leads, a set for Australia, Mexico/USA, then the European kind, and finally the best of all - the British variety. The Brits don’t get much right but they figured out electrical points and plugs really well.

I also have this assortment of cables

• 4x Thunderbolt 4/USB-C cables about 25cm long. These suit most charging, data, plugging-in situations.
• USB-C lightning leads for the iPhones
• the Apple MagSafe travel dock for Watch and iPhone
• and the get out of jail free card is my USB-A to Lightning + USB-C + Micro-USB three-headed plug.

That’s how we travel the globe keeping everything charged and no stress.

Tonight we sojourn at the Tavignano Estate in Cingoli, Italy.

Tim Cook once said that “we are high on AR for the long run” and it’s true, for 28 years Apple - and the rest of the tech industry - has been noodling around on augmented reality and virtual reality.

Out of a purely personal interest, I started flipping through rumours about Apple and its “glasses” to see where the leakers got it right and wrong, and the next minute I’m back in 1995, so I thought a curated list of all the leaks, rumours, and related dates might be a nice record to make in the year of our headset, AVP 0.

Enjoy this trip down memory lane:

1981 - Steve Mann designs a backpack-mounted computer to control photographic equipment

While still in high-school Steve Mann wired a 6502 computer (as used in the Apple-II) into a steel-frame backpack to control flash-bulbs, cameras, and other photographic systems.

23 May, 1995 - Apple Technical Report #125: Volumetric Hyper Reality, A Computer Graphics Holy Grail for the 21st Century?

Such a display would convincingly create the illusion of objects with arbitrary optical properties. A metallic object depicted using the display would reflect the visual surroundings of the display. Dielectric materials would show correct refraction and reflection effects. Light shone on the display would illuminate the virtual objects within it. When programmed to depict empty space, the display would, for all practical purposes, disappear, rendering the contained volume invisible. Incremental steps towards such a device are discussed.

1996 - Apple demonstrates a prototype wearable computer system from Apple Computer with a Virtual I/O head-mounted display at the seventh Stereoscopic Displays and Applications conference

September 16, 1997 - Steve Jobs returns to Apple

March, 1998 - Tim Cook joins Apple as senior vice president for worldwide operations

March 21, 2002 - Apple: Stereoscopic Displays?

Apple is said to have other flat-panel technologies cooking in the labs, including stereoscopic displays

Arnold Kim writes:

Stereoscopic displays would presumably simulate 3d/VR environments. A bit unique for the consumer market… but an interesting area of research for Apple.

May 16, 2003 - Simon Greenwold publishes his Spatial Computing masters thesis

June 29, 2007 - Apple releases the iPhone

April 17, 2008 - Apple Researching Laser-Based Head Mounted Display

A user simply plugs their handheld video player such as the iPod manufactured by Apple Computer of Cupertino, Calif., into the compact laser engine attached to their belt, and places the headset on their head. The user then selects a video to be played at the handheld video player (viewing through transparent display elements).

Apple’s patent was originally filed in May 2008 and is based on a provisional patent application filed in May 2007

December 17, 2009 - Apple Working on 3D ‘Hyper-Reality’ Displays

August 24, 2011 - Tim Cook becomes CEO

October 5, 2011 - Steve Jobs passes away

January 12, 2012 - Apple is paving the Way for a new 3D GUI for iOS Devices

The invention covers a 3D display environment for a mobile device that uses orientation data from one or more onboard sensors to automatically determine and display a perspective projection of the 3D display environment based on the orientation data without the user physically interacting with (e.g., touching) the display.

August 2012 - Palmer Luckey launches the Oculus campaign on Kickstarter

22 February, 2013 - Google aims to sell Glass to consumers this year for less than $1,500

26 February, 2013 - John Gruber on Google Glass:

And the idea that people will wear things like this everywhere (as opposed to special specific scenarios, such as workers in an environment where their hands are otherwise occupied, like, say, surgeons) strikes me as creepy as hell.

December 10, 2013 - Apple’s Work on Video Goggles Highlighted in Newly Granted Patent

A goggle system for providing a personal media viewing experience to a user is provided. The goggle system may include an outer cover, a mid-frame, optical components for generating the media display, and a lens on which the generated media displayed is provided to the user. The goggle system, or head-mounted display may have any suitable appearance. For example, the goggle system may resemble ski or motorcycle goggles. To enhance the user’s comfort, the goggle system may include breathable components, including for example breathable foam that rests against the user’s face, and may allow the user to move the display generation components for alignment with the user’s eyes. In some embodiments, the goggle system may include data processing circuitry operative to adjust left and right images generated by the optical components to display 3-D media, or account for a user’s eyesight limitations.

November 24, 2014 - Job Listing Points Towards Apple’s Continued Interest in Virtual Reality

19 March 2015 - Gene Munster Claims Apple Has Augmented Reality R&D Team

May, 2015 - Apple hired Mike Rockwell from Dolby Laboratories

The team, called the Technology Development Group, developed an AR demo in 2016 but faced opposition from then-chief design officer Jony Ive and his team.

May 28, 2015 - Apple Acquires Augmented Reality Company Metaio

January 26, 2016 - Apple CEO Tim Cook: Virtual Reality is ‘Really Cool’, Has ‘Interesting Applications’

It’s really cool

January 29, 2016 - Apple Has Secret Team Working on Virtual Reality Headset

Juli Clover reports:

Hundreds of employees are part of a “secret research unit” exploring AR and VR

February 19, 2016 - Avi Bar-Zeev on his blog: On Holographic Telepresence

I may get around to telling the rest of the story some other time. But I just wanted to say how proud I am of the team and the vision to show the world a glimpse of our collective future.

March 30, 2016 - Microsoft HoloLens released

June 2016 - Avi Bar-Zeev joins Apple

July 26, 2016 - Apple CEO Tim Cook on Augmented Reality: ‘We Continue to Invest a Lot in This’

We are high on AR for the long run

August 23, 2016 - Apple Patent Details Visual-Based AR Navigation Device - reporting on a 2013 patent

The patent notes that visual-based inertial navigation systems can achieve positional awareness down to the centimetre scale without the need for GPS or cellular network signals. However, the technology is unsuitable for implementation in typical mobile devices because of the processing demands involved in variable real-time location tracking.

To overcome the limitation, Apple’s invention uses something called a sliding window inverse filter (SWF) that minimizes computational load by using predictive coding to map the orientation of objects relative to the device.

October 14, 2016 - BuzzFeed News Japan: Tim Cook Talks About Apple’s Augmented Reality Ambitions

November 14, 2016 - Mark Gurman: Apple Said to Explore Smart Glasses in Deeper Wearables Push

January 9, 2017 - Robert Scoble on Facebook: “Apple and Zeiss working together on augmented reality optics”

January 17, 2017 - John Gruber spitballing Apple AR’s usefulness

January 31, 2017 - Apple patents detail augmented reality device with advanced object recognition, POI labelling

February 28, 2017 - Apple Exploring AR in Israel as Robert Scoble Insists ‘Mixed Reality’ Glasses Coming This Year

June 26, 2017 - The Verge reports “Apple’s AR is closer to reality than Google’s”

Apple has often been accused of acting like it invented things that others have been doing for years. That complaint is not without merit, however, Apple can lay claim to transforming existing things into mainstream successes, which takes no small amount of invention in its own right.

June 29, 2017 - John Gruber on Genre Munster’s Apple Glasses predictions

I’m hard-pressed to think of anything we do today on our phones that would be better using AR glasses. Anything.

August 4, 2017 - Apple Experimenting With Several Augmented Reality Glasses Prototypes

November 2, 2017 - Tim Cook on Augmented Reality: ‘What It Will Be, What It Can Be, I Think It’s Profound’

December 4, 2017 - Apple Supplier Quanta Computer Teams Up With Lumus to Make Lenses for Augmented Reality Smart Glasses

January 12, 2018 - Apple Reportedly Met With Potential Suppliers of Augmented Reality Glasses at CES 2018

During CES, representatives from major players like Apple, Facebook, and Google met with suppliers that make the nuts and bolts required to power AR glasses, according to people familiar with the meetings.

March 1, 2019 - Tim Cook to Investors: Apple is Working on Future Products That Will ‘Blow You Away’

February 4, 2019 - Variety: The Inventor of the HoloLens Just Left Apple

Bar-Zeev has been working in the AR/VR space for close to three decades. Back in the ’90s, he was part of a team at Disney that worked on some early VR experiences for the company’s theme parks, including “Aladdin’s Magic Carpet” VR ride.

He then went on to co-found Keyhole, the company that later got acquired by Google to become the foundation of Google Maps. After a brief stint at Linden Lab, Bar-Zeev worked for four years at Microsoft.

“He helped found and invent Hololens at Microsoft, assembling the very first AR prototypes, demos and UX concepts, sufficient to convince his leadership,” according to his LinkedIn bio.

Avi says:

“I left my full-time position at Apple in January. I had the best exit one can imagine. I have only nice things to say about Apple and won’t comment on any specific product plans.”

March 8, 2019 - Kuo: Apple’s AR Glasses to Launch in 2020 as iPhone Accessory

June 27, 2019 - Jony Ive leaves Apple.

August 29, 2018 - Apple Purchased Akonia Holographics, a Company That Makes Lenses for AR Glasses

November 11, 2019 - Apple Said to Release AR Headset With 3D Scanning in 2022, Followed by Sleeker Glasses in 2023 & New AR Sensor Coming to 2020 iPad Pro and iPhone Models, AR/VR Headset as Soon as 2021

Plus, The Information reports on the infamous “1000 person meeting”: Apple Eyes 2022 Release for AR Headset, 2023 for Glasses

Apple executives discussed the timelines, which haven’t been previously reported, in an internal presentation to employees at the company’s Cupertino, California, campus in October, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple Vice President Mike Rockwell, who heads the team responsible for Apple’s AR and virtual reality initiatives, led the meeting, which included new details about the design and features of the AR headset, these people said. The product timetables run counter to recent analyst and media reports that said an Apple AR device could arrive as early as next year.

March 24, 2020 - Apple’s AR Glasses Could Launch by 2022 as Suppliers Reportedly Ramp Up Development

May 19, 2020 - ‘Apple Glass’ Rumored to Start at $499, Support Prescription Lenses, and More

Apple originally planned to unveil the glasses as a “One More Thing” surprise at its iPhone event in the fall, but restrictions on in-person gatherings could push back the announcement to a March 2021 event

May 21, 2020 - Jon Prosser Claims Apple is Working on ‘Steve Jobs Heritage Edition’ AR Glasses, Gurman Calls Rumor ‘Complete Fiction’

They’re also working on a prototype, a Steve Jobs Heritage Edition, similar to how we had an Apple Watch Edition, like that ridiculous $10,000 gold one when it first came out. Some like tribute to Steve Jobs, obviously just like a pure marketing ploy at this point.

Extra: Twitter thread between Prosser and Gurman on the subject.

May 21, 2020 - Apple’s Augmented Reality Glasses Again Rumored for 2021 Launch

October 22, 2020 - Apple Glasses Will Reportedly Use Sony’s ‘Cutting-Edge’ OLED Micro-Displays to Deliver ‘Real AR Experience’

January 6, 2021 - Apple Glasses Reportedly Progressing Towards Engineering Verification Stage With Focus on Battery Life and Weight

January 21, 2021 - Bloomberg: Apple’s First AR/VR Headset ‘Pricey, Niche Precursor’ to More Ambitious AR Glasses and Could Launch Next Year

March 7, 2021 - Kuo: Apple to Launch Mixed Reality Headset in Mid 2022 and Augmented Reality Glasses by 2025

April 26, 2021 - Apple Glasses Prototype Reportedly Falls Behind 2021 Testing Schedule

October 28, 2021 - Facebook rebrands to Meta, as in “the metaverse”

Mark Zuckerberg:

The metaverse is the next frontier

January 17, 2023 - Development on Augmented Reality ‘Apple Glasses’ Postponed Indefinitely

March 12, 2023 - Apple CEO Tim Cook Ordered Headset Launch Despite Designers Wanting to Wait for AR Glasses

June 5, 2023 - Apple Vision Pro announced at WWDC 2023

A must-listen on the Apple Vision Pro is Cortex’s most recent episode where Myke Hurley recounts his demonstration experience with the product.

Was just driving and stopped at a red traffic light in a small Italian village and a civilian car drives up being me, looks around, and just overtakes me and runs the red light. I love Italy.

South Carolina, you go grrl

I’ve been playing around with 360 content for over seven years ago now and I have a few questions about where Apple is going to take the format.

If you make 360 content today, you spend a lot of time looking at content like this:

It’s not as appealing as the embeds below.

I’ve recorded my work creating marriage ceremonies in 360 video, and with my various DJI drones, I’ve been trying to create 360 still content as well.

My question and thought for today is how will the new spatial computing frontier handle consumer stills and video in 360? Will Apple standardise the media, and let it be viewed in Preview or Quick Look?

Will other devices be able to make content for the Apple Vision, will Apple Vision 3D or 360 content be viewable and enjoyed on other platforms?

How should content creators prepare for this new content-style? Is this permission to buy new gear?!!? (Please let my wife know if so).

I’ve been bullish on 360 for over seven years, I’m excited to see where it goes.

Where we’re currently staying in Northern Italy

Playa Ballandra, Mexico

Brisbane, Australia

Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

Malbun snow village, Liechtenstein

Lake Wolfgang, Austria

El Pescadero, Mexico

And where we’ll build our home one day, Tasmania

I just want to go on the record for being totally cool and not scared at all by the demonic kitten sound coming from the vineyard outside our Airbnb in Northern Italy. I am a big brave man and not scared by the feline calling out in the pitch black night.

Apple Reminders in iOS 17 is finally getting pretty useful

How Italians know whether to walk around shirtless or not

Our Italian Airbnb’s TV made me feel all nostalgic

I’m back baby!

Listening to an investor on a podcast today reminded me of how and why I do what I do. He was talking about advice that he had been given regarding his investment portfolio, and the person giving the advice said how well does that pie chart of what you’ve invested in reflect or match your interests, talents, and skills? The advice being that you should invest in what you know, invest in what you are passionate about.

So, after a solid sabbatical that has taken us through Mexico, the United States of America, and so much of Europe, I am proud to say that we’re coming back to Australia in August and I’m coming back to work as a celebrant.

It’s been a wild couple of years where I didn’t know if I’d ever want to create weddings anymore, but it turns out I just needed a few months off and some quality time with my girls.

I say all of that, to say this. There’s a book, and a principle, called the proximity principle, and it’s a simple principle. The idea is that the people that are around you, the people that are your community, are the people most likely to be able to help you.

So there are two things I would love some help with. Number one, when we get home we have to buy some cars, and buying a car today is terrible. If you or someone you know is selling your car, let a brother know. Secondly, we’re coming back to work and my calendar is wide open. So if you know someone getting married, anywhere in the world, let them know that your mate Josh is a pretty good celebrant.

Normally I’d say I’m looking forward to catching up with you when I’m home for a beer, but it turns - and I’ve researched this extensively on myself during this sabbatical - that beers make me fat and bloated and sick.

So instead I’m looking forward to an old-fashioned or red wine when I’m home.

See you soon!

Is there an AI tool around yet to help manage customer journeys? New client comes in, and the AI can take that journey on the pre-set rails we decide on in the business. Automation, but with intelligence?

Made our way into Italy today and caught the sun at it’s grandest, just before it goes to sleep.

I accidentally installed the developer beta of iOS 17. It’s mostly fine with a handful of annoying bugs you’d expect to see three months away from launch, but I’m so grateful for offline Apple Maps. Get me some offline Apple Translate and I’ll be set!

Whenever someone sees a photo of mine and asks me what iPhone I used my 25kg full ThinkTank camera bag weeps.

The thing that’s extremely visible throughout Europe is that there was a time that buildings weren’t just built but they were created, and created beautifully.

How did that art get lost?

A 360 view of the sunset on our last night in Liechtenstein from the Fürstin-Gina-Weg, or in English, Princess Gina memorial trail on the Sareis mountain ridge overlooking the village of Malbun which has been our home for the last week.

Snuck over the border to Switzerland to watch the sun set today

Striking images at the Lichtenstein national museum of a medieval Liechtensteiner teenager using his early-model iPhone

Weirdest thing I’ve seen in Liechtenstein award goes to …

How all men bathe

Hey, Europe. Why?

Despite being 450km from an ocean or sea, summer has hit Lichtenstein and the country’s beach is open!

It’s normally pretty hard to try and fit an entire nation in one photo. It’s a little bit easier if you’re making a 360 panoramic photo. But still, most nations don’t fit.

So I can proudly say I think I got almost all of Liechtenstein in this photo.

Showed the kids what the early iPhones looked like at the Liechtenstein National Museum

Can you spot which country FIFA left off the list of countries that play football/soccer in the FIFA exhibit at the Lichtenstein national museum?

I have a confession to make.

I didn’t know “The Alps” were a thing. I thought people referred to “the alps” when they referred to alpine areas.

This probably explains why I nerded out pretty hard when I got to the Alps and kept on typing the alps and all my computing devices would autocorrect to The Alps.

Anyway, here’s a 360 photo of a part of the Alps from Kufstein in Austria.

And another from Lake Wolfgang

You should not open a door and see someone pooping. Srsly.

From the University of Berkshire Hathaway by Daniel Pecaut, Corey Wrenn:

Buffett also shared some of his classic bits of wisdom about growing wealth. Spend less than what you make. Know and stay within your circle of competence. The only businesses that matter are the ones you put your money in. Keep learning over time. Don’t lose. Insist on a margin of safety.

About three hours ago I was putting my daughter to bed and thought it would be cute to have ChatGPT write a fairytale about Luna and where we’re staying this week, Liechtenstein.

I thought it was a cute story and something others might enjoy.

Three hours later I’ve had Midjourney make illustrations, assembled the book - very roughly - in the ‘Kindle Kids Book Creator’, and it’s now submitted to the Amazon Kindle store.

You can see the ChatGPT prompts here and download the .mobi file here. When it’s live on the Kindle store I believe this link will get you there.

Three hours from a good idea to a low-fi book being published.

One of my childhood happy memories was receiving gifts from my Aunty Tracey who lived in Lichtenstein. She was always sending Liechtenstein paraphernalia and propaganda and I was here for it.

For over 30 years I’ve kept this magical vision in my mind of what the richest country per capita on earth would look like.

How safe could a country with no defence force feel? How do you even get to a country that has no airport? How small can the smallest country to win an Olympic medal be? How beautiful could the only country on earth to be completely in the alps be?

Today I got some answers.

P.S. Scroll to the bottom of the post for an awesome 360 photo!

We’re really lucky to be staying near the summits of the mountains, in Malbun, with friends of my aunt (thank you Martina and Markus!), it feels like we’re on the set of a fantastical movie. It’s unbelievably beautiful here.

The two furthest-away boundaries of the entire nation are 25km apart!

Some of the most interesting Lichtenstein facts I know:

1. Liechtenstein is one of the smallest countries in the world, both in terms of land area and population. It covers just 160 square kilometres, about the physical size of Geelong, with a population of just over 39,000, about the same population as the town of Orange in New South Wales.
2. It is one of only two countries in the world that are “double landlocked”, which means they are landlocked by countries that are also landlocked. The other is Uzbekistan.
3. Despite its small size, Liechtenstein is one of the wealthiest countries in the world per capita. The Prince of Lichtenstein, the head bloke, makes $40 mil a month off his own investments and businesses, he doesn’t take a wage or anything like that.
4. Liechtenstein is the world’s largest exporter of false teeth, specifically for dentures. This is due to the presence of Ivoclar Vivadent, a company that leads the world in false teeth manufacturing. The country is also home to Hilti the construction tools company.
5. Liechtenstein doesn’t have its own airport or railway system. The nearest airport is in Zurich, Switzerland. For rail, it is served by the Swiss railways.
6. Liechtenstein is a principality, governed by a constitutional monarch who holds expansive powers, including the ability to veto legislation. It is the last remaining monarchy in the Holy Roman Empire.
7. Liechtenstein had the highest gross domestic product (GDP) per person in the world, when adjusted by purchasing power parity.
8. The entire country is invited to the castle of the Prince of Liechtenstein for beer and pretzels on National Day (August 15).
9. Despite being an independent country, Liechtenstein uses the Swiss Franc as its official currency.
10. Liechtenstein has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. It has even been reported that the country’s citizens often don’t lock their doors.
11. Liechtenstein disbanded its army in 1868 because it was too costly. In fact, Switzerland has been responsible for its defence since 1923. The CIA World Factbook for many years incorrectly stated it had a defence budget of $12. It’s actually closer to zero.
12. The country’s capital, Vaduz, and the region of the Alps, has been recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site for its stunning alpine beauty.
13. Liechtenstein is known for its excellent wines. The Prince of Liechtenstein Winery, owned by the princely family, is one of the most famous wineries. I drank one of his beers today and it’s equally delicious.
14. Despite its location in Central Europe, Liechtenstein managed to remain neutral and was untouched during both World War I and World War II.
15. There are more businesses registered in Lichtenstein than residents, so most of the residents work in support of these businesses, or in tourism, dentistry, or working for Hilti making tools.

Be curious, not judgmental.

– Walt Whitman

I vividly remember all of my earliest computer experiences. I remember borrowing computer magazines from the school library that contained basic code, and then taking it to the Apple IIe in the back of my classroom. I would spend hours typing in code just to run another program. I also remember building a spreadsheet to help my dad run his business, and printing our own greeting cards with personalised messages on our black-and-white, dot matrix printer.

Even back in the 90s, there was talk of this coming artificial intelligence wave. Funnily enough, my entire experience from the very first day was about artificial intelligence. The simple fact that I could press the letter ‘a’ on a plastic keyboard and then see that letter appear on the computer screen in front of me, or even get printed out by a printer, was, in my humble opinion, a form of artificial intelligence. This might be an oversimplified view, but whether it’s displaying the letter ‘a’ on a computer screen or using ChatGPT, it’s all about computers computing.

In 1999, Bill Gates published a book called ‘Business @ the Speed of Thought’. I read it maybe a year later, and the foundational principles of “using computers for a real purpose” have stuck with me ever since. One idea was that a sandwich shop could use just-in-time ordering for sandwich ingredients based on previous order histories for different days of the week, taking into account seasons, weather, and trends - a task that a computer in 1999 could perform with some effort, but a task a computer in 2023 could handle effortlessly. This resonates with Steve Jobs’s idea that computers are like bicycles for the mind, an idea based on the fact that the fastest and most productive animal on the planet is not a human, but a human on a bicycle.

I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.

This simple principle - that humans are more efficient on a bike, and that the human mind is more efficient when using a computer - has proven true in my life every day for the last 30 years.

Quickly replying to enquiry emails on my iPhone from a toilet cubicle at my last job before becoming self-employed was a key factor in my early success.

That’s my encouragement to anyone skeptical about the 2023 “AI wave”, including ChatGPT, large language models, transformer models, AI, generative art, etc. It’s just what computing is now. Embrace it and exploit it to your benefit. Whether it’s for play or for work, use these technologies to not only stay ahead of the pack, but to keep up with the pack.

A fellow wedding celebrant argued on a post of mine about AI that anyone using this technology should be de-registered. My counter-argument is that any celebrant (or entrepreneur) not using this technology will self de-register within a few years, sinking into irrelevance and inefficiency due to their refusal to adapt.

AI’s right of reply

As an AI developed by OpenAI, I’d like to add that I’m designed to assist and augment human capabilities rather than replace them. In the case of a wedding celebrant, for example, I could help with tasks such as drafting vows or organizing schedules. The idea isn’t to detract from the human element, but rather to enhance it, freeing up time for more personal interactions.

The notion of de-registering those who use AI perhaps stems from a fear of being replaced or a misunderstanding of AI’s role. AIs are tools, much like computers or smartphones, meant to assist humans in various tasks and should be seen as such. Adopting AI and other technological advancements can lead to increased efficiency and enable people to adapt to the fast-paced world we live in. It’s about integrating technology into our lives and work in a way that benefits us all.

View the chat thread with ChatGPT to see how ChatGPT helped me with this post.

I’ll always remember the day I met the late Gold Coast Mayor, Ron Clarke, and he called me Red Dog for no apparent reason.

In 2012 I was newly married. Britt and I had decided to take our wedding business somewhere bigger than 1-2 weddings a year, so we started marketing and building out content.

Every day was so exciting, going from nothing to something.

It feels the same at the moment, after having essentially dropped off the wedding industry map for a year, coming back in I feel like a newcomer.

So getting these kinds of emails is weird and beautiful and terrible and amazing.

Never change, wedding industry.

Driving across Austria this week we’ve seen plenty of castles, we even stayed in one, and every sighting of one is pretty special.

There’s one near us which looks very much like a castle, and tonight on our last night in Hopfgarten I found out the history of the castle on Atlas Obscura and it’s the most interesting of stories:

In the final weeks of the European theater of World War II, an unexpected union of German and American forces guarded a select group of abandoned Nazi prisoners against the Waffen-SS. The conflict fought by this unique joint American-German alliance is frequently referred to as the strangest battle of World War II.

Castle Itter was first built in the ninth century by the Bavarians and spent many years as a private residence. In May of 1943, after the Anschluss of Austria, it was transformed into a prison. For two years, French captives considered to be of high value were confined within its walls.

But as Stephen Harding writes in The Last Battle, those prisoners eventually found themselves unguarded and thrust into a precarious position. Days after Hitler died by suicide, it became clear the war had reached a turning point. The commander and warden of the prisoners at Castle Itter abandoned their posts, knowing the end of the war was near. The remaining guards also fled, essentially giving the castle to those imprisoned within.

This left the prisoners vulnerable to the loyal Waffen-SS troops prowling the countryside in search of deserters and enemies of the regime. This is when the strange, unlikely union of German and American forces began. Kurt-Siegfried Schrader, a highly decorated SS Hauptsturmführer and Josef “Sep” Gangl, a Wehrmacht Major, joined Captain John “Jack” Carey Lee, Jr., an American Tank Company Commander, in protecting the prisoners and defending the castle.

Schrader and Gangl had become disillusioned with the Nazi ideology and both independently connected with the Austrian resistance. Upon hearing the prisoners at the castle were unguarded, Schrader went to the fortress to protect those held inside. Gangl, now serving as the head of the local resistance, was aware the forces under his command would not be strong enough to fight against the nearby Waffen-SS troops. He realized he needed the American forces to arrive, so he set off to find them in Kufstein.

Not long after arriving in Kufstein, Gangl met up with Lee and they began plotting. After a reconnaissance mission, Lee and his friend brought their Sherman Tanks to the defend the castle. But along the way, poor infrastructure caused one tank and its crew to be left behind.

Once at the castle, Wehrmacht soldiers and the few Americans prepared for battle. The prisoners were instructed to remain safely in the cellar, but many defied these orders and fought alongside the German and American troops. The stage was now set for the fight.

Between 100 and 150 Waffen-SS troops attacked the castle in the early morning hours of May 5. Though one Wehrmacht soldier abandoned his post during the fighting, the remaining American-German defenses held the prison until more American troops from the 142nd Infantry Regiment arrived 12 hours after the fighting had begun. With the help of the additional American troops, the guards defeated the Waffen-SS in what’s viewed the last battle fought in the European theater of World War II. Gangl sadly perished during the fight.

We’re taking the girls to one of the smallest countries in the world tomorrow, somewhere I’ve known about since I was a very young boy. My aunt lived in Liechtenstein and would send me books, toys, and Lienchtenstein paraphernalia every year for my birthday, I loved it! So, I thought I’d prepare for the trip by asking ChatGPT questions about the country and the journey.

Steve Jobs once described computers as a bicycle for the mind, and ChatGPT is the most powerful example of that so far.

Retiring now

It’s so pleasurable to read lovely and persuasive writing like this

I know that we have ye olde internet, but I think I’d still like to have a physical encyclopaedia at home for our kids. Check out this Ars Technica review, and the cost of a new set!

Watched the sun set into Germany across the German/Austrian border tonight.

There’s no kangaroos in Austria.

You know what’s funny about our time in Austria is that I knew nothing about the country a few weeks ago, my main exposure being when I would be in America or Mexico, introducing myself a an Australian and they’d think I said Austrian and make some stupid comments about how they have always wanted to visit Europe. But thanks to a tip from a friend who recommended renting a car in Vienna because it’s cheaper than Italy, we’re exploring Austria and loving it!

Two more sleeps til Liechtenstein!!

I was asked recently about advice for travelling with young children.

My family including our now 4.5 and 2 year olds, left home almost a year ago and I have this advice: after about 37 accomodations and eight countries.

• Travel light. Lighter than you think. Bring as little stuff as possible.
• Lots of snacks. More than you think you need.
• Make iPad/TV shows a special treat. Fish out the special treat when necessary for sanity or social goodwill like in a line, stuck in a train or plane cabin, or a restaurant.
• Discipline your kids lovingly, positively, and well in private so they are awesome humans when in public.
• Teach your kids to be bored and look out the window.
• Figure out what kind of daily sleep/wake/activity routine or schedule works best for your kids and run with it so that all of you have a good day and you’re not dragging your kids through a hike they were never going to enjoy.
• Expect to see and do far less things than you imagined. If we do one travel or touristy thing a day that’s a win. Two is a big day. Three is a mistake.
• When in lines at immigration or other important things, and they’re really unhappy, just grin and bare it. It’s a few minutes of everyone’s life, we’ll all be fine, and all the other assholes around you have been expecting the tantrum anyway. If people look at us or comment on a tantrum, I just joke about it like “sorry, she just learned about taxes” or “sorry, this is my first abduction and it’s not really going well.”
• Teach your kids their names, ages, and your names so that when police come for you after you make a joke about abductions you can prove they’re yours. Make sure they know not to joke about who their parents are and what their names are.
• Bring extra dummies/soothers.
• We swear by the Phil & Ted’s Travel Cot version 5. Not sponsored. We’ve tried the rest, the Bugaboo is awesome, Phil & Ted’s is better.
• We also swear by the BabyZen YoYo and/or the Baby Jogger City Tour travel prams. The rest are not as good. Not sponsored. But come on guys, send us money.
• When boarding flights ask the staff where to “put the kids” as if you’re expecting them to not sit with you. Say it with a straight face, and kind of hold the child out toward the staff, gesturing that they can take them now.
• Book accomodation that is walkable to public transport and parks. Nothing else in your life matters more than a good playground. Also look for accomodation with cooking facilities, you’re going to want to cook at home.
• Whatever you order for them at a restaurant will not be good enough so share meals. Encourage them to try new foods. Our mantra is that you can’t say you don’t like something if you haven’t tried it yet.
• Almost all long queues can be skipped if you are a family, or if you accidentally go down the not-foreign-passport line, or if your kids has a tantrum. Turn that lemon into line-skipping lemonade.
• I’ve got VLC installed on my phone with a series of old school TV shows offline like Franklin the Turtle. Old school slow TV shows are better than the visual cocaine that modern kids shows are. Damn you, Paw Patrol.
• Take a million photos. Sync them with iCloud Photo Library so when you drop your phone in the Mediterranean Sea you’re not devastated. Buy disposable film cameras for the kids to make them feel involved.
• Each of our girls has a plush snuggle toy that has come with them the whole journey. When you’re changing accomodation every few days a common smell and feel is a godsend.
• I’m lucky to have travelled so much with Qantas that I have a Qantas Platinum status which gets us more luggage and airport lounges with OneWorld airlines worldwide, this is so good with kids. Everyone in the Oneworld First Class Lounge thinks they’re having a fancy aviation with champagne moment but then in runs my two year old ready to bring hell. It’s my favourite part of every flight.
• Snacks. Water. Lots of snacks.
• My kids like to play with tape so we have random coloured kid’s sticky tape for them to play with on flights. The water-painting kits for kids are awesome, they come with a water “brush” and it reacts with the board, so they think they’re painting but it’s zero mess apart from some water. So many books as well, we’ll buy, read, and donate books regularly.
• Sleep. So much sleep.
• There’s no greater experience than allowing your kids to sulk in different cultural settings.
• I use the Anker 4-port chargers and buy the figure 8 lead for the appropriate country, then make sure everything we own is USB chargeable.

These experiences and memories will be priceless. Be in the moment for them all.

Cuddling Goldie after a late night diaper change and I was contemplating how she and Luna have slept under almost 37 roofs since we left home in September and we have seven left. Some kids won’t go to the bathroom outside of home, but these kids just take it all in their stride. I’m a proud dad.

Driving through Mondsee (Moon Lake)

Blue skies and tailwinds makes for a good day in the office/Mavic 3 at Drachenwand (in English, Dragon Wall).

I’m not sure I’ll ever feel an emotion stronger than what I felt when I saw this #iykyk

There’s a campaign to update the Australian Marriage Act of 1961 and every letter to a Federal Member of Parliament helps move the needle on getting the legislation changed and updated.

Your help is welcomed/begged-for.

www.marriageact.plus

Views of and from and above Lake Wolfgang, near Salzburg, Austria

David Cain in Everything Must Be Paid for Twice:

If you look around your home, you might notice many possessions for which you’ve paid the first price but not the second. Unused memberships, unread books, unplayed games, unknitted yarns.

I’m at a cafe in Pöggstall, middle of nowhere, Austria, and next to me are two elderly couples loudly discussing the issues of the world in German.

After an hour or so of me having no idea what they’re on about, one, mid-sentence says “Netflix, Paramount, Disney, Apple, Prime” then sighs.

Nice to know that monthly costs of streaming TV is a global, multigenerational, problem.

We flew into Vienna two days ago and didn’t even go into the city, but straight out into the hills, which despite their beauty, they are not filled with music. Unless I’m deaf?

But they are filled with the most wonderful little Austrian villages, like Pöggstall.

An important note from a local store

Tonight’s AirBnb is 770 years in the making: Pöggstall Castle, in Lower Austria.

Our 35th accomodation since we left home last August. Honestly thinking that Britt and I could bring some value to AirBnb consulting, there’s only a little bit of effort between a great Airbnb and a poor one.

Who wins the MS Publisher 2023 wars? Canva? The new Adobe Express? Microsoft Designer?

I imagine it would feel rather nice to be proud of the part of your story that you didn’t really have any choice in. The country you were born in, the state, the region. The people group you were raised in. Parents and the generations that preceded you, your family, your heritage, your culture.

I imagine that if you were so blessed to be of good stock, then you’d probably be delicate and defensive when that story comes under fire - whether it’s comedy or outright slander.

I imagine that’s why I’ve upset friends and lost social media klout this week after joking about the UK and how it didn’t meet the hype, in my ever so humble opinion.

Friends and strangers let me know how they felt about it, and it honestly left me stunned. But as I watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace yesterday it all fell into place for me. These people, Brits, people who like the Brits, people who love London and the UK, all this pomp and bullshit from the royals to the status quo is an essential part of their story. It’s who they are this external force of nature.

You dare make a joke about London, and you’re attacking their identity.

I see myself as blessed because I know exactly who I am. I’m the Gold Coast born, Central Queensland raised white boy born with colonial blood, entering the world not into the lands of my people but someone else’s land. Born of convict blood, sent from England to the stolen land down under generations ago. I’m the abandoned son, a homeless teen, who got by the only way available to him, working.

My birthplace, my country, my people, they don’t know me. There is a small group of friends and family who stand with me, but we could fill a minivan. If I was to die tomorrow my funeral would be a lovely occasion for the small group attending. They’re a good lot.

But my culture, my family, my tribe is a single generation old, my generation. With my wife I have drawn a line in the sand and said it ends with me. Britt and I, we’re starting new.

I also know how few people read my words or see my art. I’m no Shakespeare or Monet.

I have nothing to be precious of but my wife and children, my work, my words and my art, my relationships and my reputation.

Make a funny joke about them and I’d probably push back hard as well.

Our pilot wanted to give us the full Heathrow tour. Never go full Heathrow.

Adios, Heathrow

The Withers family has done London

David Whyte:

The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

Does anyone want to start an Australian airline with me and ChatGPT?

Did you know that the Windows XP Bliss wallpaper was photographed in Sonoma? The same Sonoma this year’s macOS is named after.

People seeing the iMac, then iPod, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, and then Apple Vision, on day one: it’s stupid, not for me, too expensive, I’ll never buy it.

People seeing the iMac, then iPod, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, and then Apple Vision, five years later: yes, please, shut up and take my money.

 Vision Pro

London is a fascinating place where Big Tea™️ has convinced an entire population that garbage water is a valid hot drink.

Everyone speaks in a cute and fake-sounding British accent, whilst real people actually travel on the public transport which accepts the Apple Express Transit Card feature.

AirBnbs are priced like Paris but unlike Paris, London is in England, which is far less fancy than France. Here, they drive on the left side of the road but walk on the right side of the path, and there’s this forced politeness in the air like if you’re not polite you’ll get stabbed. Who knew Jack The Ripper could have left such a lasting impression on culture.

The people are quite proud of their flag, so much so that I could definitely imagine them sailing to other countries and giving them free British flags in exchange for the rights to the whole country.

Despite their global shirt-fronting and general we-think-we’re-cool dispositions, the people of London either commute longer than they actually work, or they live impoverished and close to the famed series of Tubes, spending their final quids on beer or denying that Europe is a cool place.

Brits have influenced more culture in my life than I’d care to admit, but I’m still not sure it’s better than their penal colony I call home.

Long live King Chuck, God knows the bunting and signage stockists and manufacturers couldn’t handle the demand for at least another few years.

Mum to kid (about 4) trying to get him to do something: … or someone’s going to be very upset with you.

Kid, loudly, in the sweetest British accent: well someone is a fucking idiot aren’t they?

Every parent in the playground just bursts out in laughter.

I needed help planning the month ahead’s travel, having not been off the beaten track too much in Europe, so I engaged everyone’s favourite help, ChatGPT. Check out the chat transcript to see how I got to this itinerary.

British things

Come together, right now

Hey Britain, why did you all get so excited about leaving Europe but still walk on the right hand side of the footpath?

Everyone’s talking about augmented reality at WWDC but no-one’s talking about sharing bodily liquid movements.

Come on Apple. Let me share more bodily liquid stats with my friends.

I’d like a 2023 version of Piano Man where Paul, the real estate novelist, upskills to writing prompts for ChatGPT, John the bartender starts a TikTok, and Billy Joel is sampling in Serato.

185 million views on Unsplash, 19 million views on Pexels, and I’ve just sold my first photo from my print store. Don’t rush and twist an ankle, there’s no queue at https://art.josh.withers.co.

Don’t tell anyone but the opening of track six on the new Foo Fighters album had me thinking that there was a Taylor Swift collab inside. It’s ok, it was Nothing At All.

I made a Steve Jobs chatbot based on the book Make Something Wonderful and asked him how he would bring AR glasses to market.

“… and we’re calling it iVision!”

Luna’s following in my footsteps!

By being a radio broadcaster to an unprofitably small audience.

Remember that classic scene from Notting Hill where Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts' characters meet at a travel bookstore and then get a doughnut from that Brisbane doughnut chain?

Overcast and 14 degrees Celsius and the Britts are so sure it’s good weather that there’s a kid at the park in their swimmers.

London things

WordPress just turned 20 years old, which means I’ve been using it for different projects for a smidge under 20 years.

My memory is that I was about to use b2/cafelog for a project and someone told me to try this new fork, WordPress.

Cheers for making the web better, WordPress!

Luna, who considers herself royalty, wanted to present at the king’s house

Someone call the fire brigade

Maggi Hambling:

It is not difficult to make a work of art, the difficulty lies in being in the right state to do it.

Withers on film in Hawaii

Withers on film at the TWA Hotel.

Man, I loved this hotel!

Withers in Mexico.

I found an undeveloped roll of film from our time in Baja California Sur. Missing Cerritos Beach!

Withers in Paris on 35mm film

What is, and isn’t, AI/artificial intelligence?

Is displaying the letter a on a computer screen, or printing it to paper with a printer, by pressing the a key on a keyboard artificial intelligence?

Every leg of this journey we drop a bag. We’re down three suitcases so far.

At this stage when we come home to Australia in August we’ll be backpackers.

Paris 🚄🚇 London

Bought Luna her first camera, the Hyundai Excel of first cameras: a Nikon point and shoot.

I believe that my kids should save for their first Canon but I’m happy to pay for their potato camera.

She called us to the church house, gin house, school house, and outhouse. She called us to the Nutbush City limits from the wedding dance floors of Australia to a little old town in Tennessee.

She was, simply the best dance floor filler.

She is the Queen of Rock, the Empress of Soul.

Here’s to the diva, Tina Turner.

AI is genuinely exciting and terrifying but most of us nerds have been thinking about it and talking about it for 30 years.

This is Steve Jobs in 1983:

…when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life—his or her whole life—and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday, after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing.

If you ever want to hate yourself you should try writing a book, then editing the book, and then reading it.

AI is super interesting to me

This is beautiful and terrifying

A terrifying argument for paper voting in voting booths from Ready Player One:

Besides, now that everyone could vote from home, via the OASIS, the only people who could get elected were movie stars, reality TV personalities, or radical televangelists.

Do dogs understand elevators or are they just like ‘Ok it’s time to get into the world changer’?

(via @ronnui_ on Twitter via the Dense Discovery email)

Those good family dinners, they’re no accident

Hawaii versus Paris

I

Imagine being as big as a failure as Yahoo

Dan Shipper in The Unreasonable Effectiveness of 1-1 Learning:

One of the most famous studies in educational psychology found that students who learned through 1-1 tutoring performed two sigma—98%—better than students who learned through a traditional classroom environment.

Just found out that Metallica played a concert across town last night and there were tickets available. I had Australian tickets for their Covid-cancelled concert. This is the most disappointed I’ve been since we left Australia!

Film’s not dead.

On arrival to a film lab at 3pm on a Friday in Paris there’s like seven people ahead of me and three behind me pretty quickly.

If publishers paid as much attention to how their articles were experienced by readers as newspaper editors used to, maybe they wouldn’t be going broke?

“Non-smoking Garden of Eden”

As Moses wrote in the book of Genesis, the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food except for tobacco.

A mum playing Frozen on her phone for her daughter at the playground is super confused as to why every other kid at the playground is up in her grill right now.

Watching 1980s Inspector Gadget with Luna this morning and I never realised how much Gadget influenced my life. All I ever wanted was Penny’s computer book, Gadget’s computer watch, and being accepted for being basically useless in society saved only by the woman by your side every time.

Sitting in a park in Paris watching my kids play I was struck by the idea that at age 41, married for almost 11 years, with two children, that I’m possibly an adult now.

Which probably sounds weird to anyone familiar with the concept of becoming an adult in our society somewhere between puberty and 21.

But I think we lack something in modern society - I know I lacked it in my childhood - that would not only help the 41 year old so know that they’re adults but also help all of us take ownership of our lives. Help us understand that you can either make your life or let someone or something else make it for you. Help us take responsibility for our lives, our families, and our futures.

It’s ceremony.

We shy away from it, not wanting to celebrate birthdays or anniversaries in public, or for some of us we even deny our age. We minimise weddings and engagements saying we don’t want to be the centre of attention - and this is even worse in Australia where tall poppy syndrome rears its ugly head stopping us from celebrating our achievements in life. I even hear it from people who, when they find out I’m a wedding celebrant, proudly tell me how they just went to the registry office and didn’t have a wedding.

For hundreds of generations we have celebrated milestones and achievements with ceremony and feasting.

It’s how we know where we have been, where we are, and where we’re going.

I believe ceremony is important. It’s why I’m a marriage celebrant.

Good ceremony is where we stop, collaborate, and listen. A moment for us to speak truths, smile, laugh, draw near, and share.

I hope you find the time to stop and celebrate something this week.

Evidence that the world’s first mobile phone was probably French

Excited to share another chapter of the book today:

I still distinctly remember the day after getting engaged and Britt’s aunty called with thoughts on which horse-drawn carriage company we should use for our wedding. This was odd to me because in 2012 I had been creating weddings for over two years yet I had not even conceived of the idea that once I asked Britt to marry me that we would then proceed to a wedding.

None of the current large language models/artificial intelligences understand the concept of months, or calendar months, or leap years.

So I’m sure everything is going to work out just fine.

Look, AI is great and everything, but I think we’re going to be ok

What a wonderful time to be alive: malicious-content.zip

Photos I made yesterday in Paris

I stacked a Lime scooter an hour ago to make this photo of this local tower in Paris so you better like it or share it or comment or something so my aching shin is healed by the algorithms that control our emotional well-being.

The not her damn of paris - still under construction

The Brisbane Story Bridge of Paris is what they call it

Parisian things

The 14th of May is my celebrant anniversary and today in 2023 I begin my 15th year creating awesome marriage ceremonies for adventurous couples who really really like each other and believe that getting married matters.

They say time is the best teacher so with 14 years a wedding celebrant, 41 years 5 months a human, 10 years 8 months a husband, 4 years 6 months a father, 3 years 1 month a silver fox, 32 years 2 months a computer nerd, 6 years 1 month a Qantas Platinum Frequent Flyer, 7 days a Parisian, and 24 years 10 months as best kitchen cleaner home medalist in my home state, ask me anything.

You’ve heard of the final mile. This is the final metre.

Up until 1791 they’d been measuring things without any care for a standard, much like the USA today, but then the French astronomers Delambre and Méchain measured 10 millionths of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator through a Paris meridian, and then the government of the day installed 16 demonstrator metres around the city.

This is the last one in its original installation. There’s one other that’s been moved so who even knows if it’s legit ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Milton Glaser:

You feel differently towards the world when you make things.

I’m passionate about making photos, but I have a sub-passion in recording good metadata around those photos as they enter my iCloud Photo Library so the photos become more useful as they age. Whether they are used in Photo Memories, like “Paris 2023” and “Early Mornings with Luna”, or whether I want to search on the Photo’s “Places” function to find that photo I made ten years ago, the metadata is important to me.

When I shoot on my iPhone, the metadata is collected (normally), and if I have remembered to force quit and re-open the Canon Camera Connect app that day, when I shoot on my Canon EOS R5 the metadata is recorded, but if I shoot on Britt’s Fujifilm digital camera or my Leica film camera, no metadata is recorded by the camera.

In the before times people used notepads with pens, which is a lovely prospect, but I have an iPhone in my pocket and a Watch on my wrist. So I made an Apple Shortcut that will record the metadata in time and in place for later use, either with an EXIF editor or my personal go-to app, Metapho on the iPhone. (If you know of a Metapho competitor I’d be keen to hear it, I like Metapho but it feels forgotten by the developer and is sometimes buggy)

So these shortcuts will simply make a new Apple Note for the day if there isn’t one already and record time and place, or if you use the second shortcut that dictates a note, also that text note.

Record photography location Shortcut

Record photography location and notes Shortcut

I activate them either by tapping the home screen icon which is easy, or by asking Siri to “Record photography location”.

Feel free to use, edit, mix, re-make, and share as you find useful and beneficial for the art of making photography.

Much gratitude to Kyle Lines in the Automators Forum for helping me get the shortcuts over the line and useful for the greater population.

I think this is the great pyramid of France

Introducing, an eye full tower.

Built for the 1889 World’s Fair only to be upstaged 99 years later at 1988 World Expo by the Brisbane Sky Needle.

When you order an americano with ‘some cold milk on the side’ in Paris

Stumbled into a second-hand-camera/new-Leica store in Paris and accidentally left with a Leica film camera after swiping my credit card. Oops.

Play

Luna Withers, art critic

I stumbled across and subsequently visited an NFT art gallery in Paris today whilst walking the streets with Luna and trying to escape the rain. The art curated inside was wild and beautiful, and a joy to take in, but I also had the opportunity to talk to the curator who shared openly about their business model and passion for showcasing, sharing, and encouraging art.

They typically curate the pieces showcased but they have open weeks where creators can buy a spot on the wall, and other weeks creators can rent the whole gallery.

I’m still trying to figure out how my art works and matters in the world - besides giving it away for free on Unsplash and Pexels - but after visiting the gallery today I’m convinced that NFTs will have life and purpose long after the cryptobros move their hype engine somewhere else.

I even picked up a piece that Luna loved.

It would be amazing to see my photos on a wall like that.

My favourite thing to do in the big cities of the world is to ignore the must-do lists, the must-see places, the hotspots and the icons, and to just walk around and exist in a different big city. Walking down random streets, getting bad coffee at little-known cafes, and finding the unseen parts of a city. The towers, cathedrals, arches and museums are cool and we inevitably end up there. But there’s something really interesting to me about experiencing another people’s normal.

The playlist in the French cafe I’m sitting in just went from contemporary hits to one of the songs from Star Wars. Wild taste here.

I’ve been thinking about this story from Steve Jobs, recalled in 1996 and told in the new book Make Something Wonderful, about how and why he and Steve Wozniak started Apple:

The reason we (Woz and I) built a computer was that we wanted one, and we couldn’t afford to buy one. They were thousands of dollars at that time. We were just two teenagers. We started trying to build them and scrounging parts around Silicon Valley where we could. After a few attempts, we managed to put together something that was the Apple I. All of our friends wanted them, too. They wanted to build them. It turned out that it took maybe fifty hours to build one of these things by hand. It was taking up all of our spare time because our friends were not that skilled at building them, so Woz and I were building them for them.

We thought if we could just get what’s called a printed circuit board, where you could just plug in the parts instead of having to hand-wire the whole thing, we could cut the assembly time down from maybe fifty hours to more like an hour. Woz sold his HP calculator, and I sold my VW Microbus, and we got enough money together to pay someone to design one of these printed circuit boards for us. Our goal was to just sell them as raw printed circuit boards to our friends and make enough money to recoup our calculator and transportation.

What happened was that one of the early computer stores, in fact, the first computer store in the world, which was in Mountain View at the time, said, “Well, I’ll take fifty of these computers, but I want them fully assembled.” Which was a twist that we’d never thought of.

We went and bought the parts to build one hundred computers. We built fifty of them and delivered them. We got paid in cash and ran back and paid the people that sold us parts. Then we had the classic Marxian profit realization crisis, which was our profit wasn’t liquid—it was in fifty computers sitting on the floor.

We decided we had to start learning about sales and distribution so that we could sell the fifty computers and get back our money. That’s how we got in the business. We took our idea (for the computer) to a few companies, one where Woz worked (Hewlett-Packard) and one where I worked at the time (Atari). Neither one was interested in pursuing it, so we started our own company.

I’m interviewing newly appointed marriage celebrants for a podcast project at the moment and some don’t have a fire in their belly as to why they started. Their genesis story is missing some heart and soul. I think about them and whether they have staying power like the two Steves who just built computers because they wanted one. That early fire is valuable.

12 Ancient Greek Terms that Should Totally Make a Comeback

Aidos was actually the Greek goddess of shame, modesty, respect, and humility. Aidos, as a quality, was that feeling of reverence or shame which restrains men and women from wrong. It also encompassed the emotion that a rich person might feel in the presence of the impoverished, that their disparity of wealth, whether a matter of luck or merit, was ultimately undeserved.

Let me spin you a yarn about my favourite airport hotel, the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport in New York. This hotel is a real beauty, with a great story behind it.

Once upon a time, in the golden era of air travel, TWA - Trans World Airlines - was a big shot in the aviation world. Their Flight Center at JFK Airport, designed by the legendary architect Eero Saarinen, was the bee’s knees when it opened in 1962. It was a true symbol of the Jet Age, with its swooping lines, massive windows, and ultra-modern interiors. But, like so much technology - particularly aviation technology - it was practically obsolete by the time it opened with the Lockheed Constellation it was planned to accommodate being swiftly replaced by jetliners. TWA sadly went belly up in January 2001 and was acquired by American Airlines, who then made most of the staff redundant later that year as September 11 left a dent in the air travel market.

For years the iconic TWA Flight Center sat empty, gathering dust and waiting for someone to give it a new lease on life. Enter MCR Development, who had the idea to turn the old bird into a swanky hotel. So, in 2018 they restored the Flight Center to its former glory and added two hotel wings with 512 guest rooms.

The building

Eero Saarinen is one of the great architects of the twentieth century and although the TWA Hotel is a little different to the TWA Flight Center Saarinen designed, it’s still got the Eero blood running through its entire fuselage.

Inside

Connie

There’s a fully restored 1958 Lockheed Constellation aeroplane called “Connie” that’s been repurposed as a cocktail lounge, where you can sip on a cold one and dream about the good ol' days. The original Flight Centre was designed to serve Constellations but as quickly as TWA put them into service and the terminal started putting passengers aboard jet planes started replacing them.

The Connie was a plane at the right place but at the wrong time.

Connie was even hosting a wedding the day I was there.

The pool

The rooftop pool at the hotel is a major attraction, firstly because it’s a pool at JFK, secondly because of the view, thirdly because on cold days it’s heated like a jacuzzi, and finally because you can sip a cocktail in a jacuzzi warm pool with your kids watching Emirates Airbus A380s land and taxi so close that you could throw a stone at the captain.

The actual hotel stay

Our inbound flight to JFK from San Diego arrived at 7am, and we had a midnight flight out to Paris, so we booked an 8am to 8pm day rate that cost $249 USD which at the time was cheaper than overnight, and cheaper than two overnights which is what we’d need to book at a regular hotel to allow for an 8am to 8pm stay.

The food was actually really good. We generally don’t dine at airport hotel restaurants because their quality is usually poor and the price high, because they know they have you cornered. The Paris Cafe food however was really really good.

The front-of-house service however was poor. The housekeeping staff were beyond friendly and lovely, but the people at reception and front of the house in food and beverage service really made us feel like we’d ruined their day.

So, there you have it, the story and photos of the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport. It’s a testament to the spirit of innovation and the importance of preserving the USA’s architectural gems. If you’re ever in the Big Apple, it’s worth checking out this iconic piece of American aviation history.

Bluesky lovin

If you see my travel photos and think they’d look cool on your walls, I sell fine art prints, framed fine art prints, and canvas wraps in my online store.

Please buy a print so Luna and Goldie can afford the good croissants in Paris this week ahead, not the cheap ones dad thinks they should have.

44 hours door to door, Kona to Paris. Godspeed, us, with a four and two year old.

Ever since Twitter started falling on its face I’ve tried so many contenders, Mastodon, T2, BlueSky, Nostr, and I’ve been on micro.blog for years already and love if there, but Wavelength is the only place I’ve seen community, engagement, joy, and fun.

This is a lovely click for today

I can still remember my ICQ number 25 years on (49739400) but I can’t remember the joke about remembering my ICQ number

Why Nick Cave is attending the King’s Coronation:

I am not a monarchist, nor am I a royalist, nor am I an ardent republican for that matter; what I am also not is so spectacularly incurious about the world and the way it works, so ideologically captured, so damn grouchy, as to refuse an invitation to what will more than likely be the most important historical event in the UK of our age. Not just the most important, but the strangest, the weirdest.

The Withers family in the island of Hawaiʻi

🗿

🔱

Some feelings of the Big Island of Hawaii, or the Island of Hawaiʻi, or Hawaiʻi Island, or Big Island, or Kona, or Hawaii County, or just Hawaii. I don’t really know how to refer to this landmass tbh.

Unkept looking bloke who’s loudly mumbling to himself and is scaring the parents at the playground he’s circling because he looks like an addiction that hasn’t showered in a few days, says to me “weird day man, weird day” and gives me a cheeky grin.

Weird day.

If you’ve ever been the first guy to map parts of Australia and New Zealand, to witness the transit of Venus so ya bois in the lab could figure out how far earth is from the sun, or named an Aussie state, then this memorial marks the place some Hawaiians murdered you because they don’t take kindly to colonisers here.

Lusting after the new Teenage Engineering microphone

Sitting in a Starbucks in Kona just now and a family of four Brits fresh off the Quantum of the Seas cruise ship which just arrived in town. That’s the ship that lost a passenger overboard 1400km south of here. Apparently the person’s nickname/codename onboard the ship is “Old Mate”. I guess this is what it feels like to be a minority.

Harry Belafonte finally met Mister Tally Man and had his banana’s tallied.

James Tylor and Matt Chun in the ANZAC Myth:

The Australian government has fabricated a nationalist mythology around the invasion of Gelibolu Yarımadası (Gallipoli), telling a story of heroism and sacrifice.

The saddest part about Elon Musk screwing up Twitter and Twitter Blue is that the Internet needs to install a values system where we understand things have a cost and Twitter shouldn’t be free.

But now paying $8 for Twitter is a meme, not an exercise in human betterment.

I’ve been saying crap on the internet and into microphones connected to radio and TV towers for 20 years next year, it’s a miracle that the most scandalous thing I’ve done is MAFS series one.

I need help with panoramic images made with my DJI Mavic 3 drone. The camera itself stitches the images together but the stitch is never great. So it saves the 25 individual images, but Photoshop and Lightroom can never deal with them well. What software can help with this?

For Polkadot Wedding’s Planning Issue this month I wrote an article on choosing a wedding reading and also how you don’t need one so if you have one, let it have purpose.

Well, count me surprised and dumbfounded /s that this weird crap is happening on Spotify.

Stumbled across this fascinating story of Little Richard being in Australia in 1957, seeing the Russian satellite Sputnik in the sky and thinking the world was going to end so he takes the stage to preach the gospel at his concert instead of performing so the promoter offered refunds.

I’ve been reminiscing over Twitter this week, wondering what the last tweet will be amongst other things as Space Karen prepares to take away the verification tick on my profile that proves I am who I am, a tick gifted to me from my time in the media in Australia.

I started my current Twitter account in October 2009 but I was sure that I had an account before then so I went searching and searching and searching and found it: March 2008, @1073brekky.

In 2008 I scored my first paid breakfast radio gig: the morning show on 107.3 FM on the Gold Coast (at the time called 1073fm but now called Juice FM). I’d been training and prepping for this role for five years and was so keen. I was also a bread-and-butter kind of computer nerd, so ideally my non-nerdy radio show would have some nerdy elements. In 2008 the breakfast guy didn’t get access to the website - they probably still don’t today - so I wanted to find a way to post short updates to the website. Something inside of me felt like the internet might be a thing one day so it would be good to use it early. I’ve got so many stories about being the nerdiest and most future-thinking guy in the radio station that it broke my heart so many times to be honest.

I had heard things about this service in the USA called Twitter that had heralded a new kind of web publishing, micro-blogging. You could send updates to the service and they could appear in a website widget. I signed up, got the code to the web developer and before you know it, I could post updates to my show website! I didn’t care so much for the Tweeting, the replying, or the broadcasting. I just wanted to blog on my radio station website and the CRM didn’t allow blogging or micro-blogging or anything of the like.

Twitter solved my problem and I’m sure my problem was never in any of their minimum-viable product meetings.

About two months later I quit the station because at the time it was honestly a terrible place a human with a soul could want to work, but fifteen years on I only have good memories from my first breakfast show, my first Twitter account, and my experiences being unleashed on the Gold Coast community on the radio.

I’m working on a new business that is a web service - a mobile/desktop web app with video and audio upload components + email. I’ve never directly hired devs for this kind of project before. What kind of web dev language and tech should I be asking for in 2023?

I was moved to hear of Father Bob’s passing. I’ve never met or talked to a crankier, lovelier, old bloke who was thoroughly and passionately focused on loving and caring for humans without personal gain or agenda.

When I think about being Christ-like, I think of Bob.

Many publicly-known priests and ministers are loved by church leadership whilst being in the news for scandal and crime, while Bob was hated by church leadership whilst in the news for loving the outcasts of society.

I’d rather die a man lambasted by church leaders and known as a friend to outcasts, the downtrodden, the forgotten, the least of our society. That’s who Bob was.

Shared my nerd bio in my NerdyBio interview

Everything that was old and awesome becomes new and terrible, whist still whipping the llama’s ass.

I have a theory: today in 2023, we have a Batman because terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Centre towers in New York City, a.k.a Gotham City.

My premise is that timing of My Chemical Romance’s Welcome To The Black Parade’s release influenced Robert Pattison’s Batman at an influential age and made him the Bruce Wayne portrayed in the 2022 film, The Batman.

The 2022 Batman was born in 1991 or 1992, making him “about 30” when the movie was released.

The Batman’s parents died in 2001 (possibly 2002), the year that terrorists flew into the World Trade Towers and changed the world forever. One such change being that Gerard Way formed the band My Chemical Romance in response to the attacks. The other obvious infliction point here is that the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne is the motivation for young Bruce to become Vengeance personified.

In 2006 when The Batman was about 15 or 16 ‘Welcome To The Black Parade’ was released. Bruce is still rattled by his parent’s murders, growing up a young boy trying to figure out who he is and what his purpose is.

Your teenage years and the music you listen to through those years are formative to who you are and the music you love.

Look at some of My Chemical Romance’s lyrics from the Black Parade:

When I was a young boy, My father took me into the city, To see a marching band. He said, “Son, when you grow up, Would you be the savior of the broken, The beaten and the damned?” He said, “Will you defeat them? Your demons, and all the non-believers, The plans that they have made?” “Because one day, I’ll leave you a phantom…

Cut to 2022 in film, The Batman

“They think I am hiding in the shadows, but I am the shadows.”

Bruce Wayne is the Batman we know in 2022 because of 9/11.

Goldie, who just turned two, just buckled up her own airplane seat and is patiently awaiting takeoff whilst playing peek-a-boo with three different strangers and babbling to her neighbour.

So yeah, I think she’s doing ok developmentally.

Nashville, Tennessee ✈️ Phoenix, Arizona ✈️ Kona, Big Island of Hawaiʻi

I was a media and news man for over a decade, I loved being - what I considered to be - an important part of the community, telling its stories and keeping the community informed, safe, and entertained.

But the industry isn’t doing well.

The second story on news.com.au today is about a Fox News story about a recent TikTok that went viral, which the newsdesk found out about through a Twitter user sharing the TikTok in three parts, and the TikTok was just a replay of a Youtube clip from a radio show four years ago.

Serendipitously the original clip and radio show was broadcast about one kilometre from where I type this in Franklin, Tennessee, but there’s no good reason for Australia’s national news website - news.com.au - to publish this as a second story today. That the second most important story in Australia today is a four year old viral video is an insult to the wealth of stories Australia has to tell, and the global stories it could engage with.

Yes, it gets the clicks. Yes, it’s actually an important story inside the video, be debt free. But from a professional storytelling point of view it’s embarrassing for the news.com.au staff. Even the actual article is poorly written and just lazy.

This is the downfall of society, our storytellers are poorly incentivised to do good work, and over incentivised to do work that gets clicks that advertisers want even though no-one is clicking the ads.

Will, a mate of mine has written and released a guide on working in film and television production, something he’s an expert in.

I thought readers of my blog might appreciate the book if they or people they knew aspired to work in film production (it’s a great and personal read, even for me, an old man without film and TV aspirations), but also, they’d enjoy this excerpt about what technology you should own and be proficient in before you start as a production assistant.

“Seriously, people will look at you like you have three heads as you drag that eighty-pound hunk of plastic with the extended numerical keyboard from your bag and plop it on the desk.”

If you, or someone you know, wants a start in the film and TV production industry Will’s the book is a must-purchase and must-read - and it’s now on Kindle.

Because I’m a man-child I wanted to share my two of my favourite photos from photographing the horse sanctuary in Baja

I’m pretty sure I know enough old nerds who would enjoy this purely for the nostalgia.

Reckon we could get the ChatGPT guys to spend an an afternoon working on spam filtering?

Once all the adults admit that they don’t know what a conservatory is we’ll finally get world peace

Bad news for plastic kitchen good lovers, Tupperware is about to go broke. Turns out they were about seven decades too early on the influencer marketing trend.

Six months ago to the day we arrived in Baja California Sur without even knowing that’s what B.C.S. stood for in our hotel’s address as we filled out the entry cards.

Six months on I have a wealth of stories that I feel odd about sharing. Most of them are about how different it is in Mexico compared to Australia. Who knew?! But I can’t find a way to tell the stories without admitting that they were witnessed through my own lens of how the world should be. Paved roads, hot and strong coffee, tacos with proteins other than seafood in them, and the story about the story about George Clooney the bartender told me, all really don’t matter, unless we’re a few whiskies deep around a campfire. It’s different here, not all roads are paved, and gringoes like me have been walking in for years wondering why things here aren’t like home.

The truth is that Mexico is jam-packed with amazing people. We’ve never felt safer and we love it here.

My one takeaway today is that in six months I’ve seen about six clouds. Baja really lived up to its slogan: no bad days.

Our last Baja sunset for a while

Our last day in Baja

Last day of school for the girls in Baja

Never forget the French dancing plague of the summer of 1518.

Charlie Munger on how the world actually works:

Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.

I’ve thought about these three points pretty much every hour of every day since I first read it three days ago in James Clear’s 3-2-1 email

The future of content: video of someone watching a video of someone who wrote a song about their low self esteem sponsored by a real estate agent I’d not do business with if only because I’m not going to click an ad to take me away from watching this train wreck of a video.

Location, location, location #playacerritos

You’ve got to get up early to catch the Mexican Coke dealers

Todos Santos, BCS, on Good Friday

Still the best food and beverage proposition in Baja

Martha!

I’m doing a redesign of a website whilst also moving them from Squarespace to Shopify and I’m pretty sure the cheeky copy sprinkled across the new homepage won’t make it past the first review, but I’m quite proud of it, so I had to share it somewhere.

Good Friday for Luna

I’m going to miss living in the desert when we leave next week. So many cactus started flowering this week and they’re beautiful.

Apple’s gotta be the company to come in and either buy or partner with StabilityAI right?

“Please lower your standards”

Baja sunset

The worst sin committed by the news media, today is using synecdoches, helping simplify stories, fitting complex stories into headlines or a tweet whilst not representative of reality. People act, not synecdoches. Don’t dehumanise people, reducing their acts to those of the many.

Complex stories deserve gestation time, time for us to understand an comprehend them.

Millennial quiz: What have you got if you’ve got Sick Puppies next to Puddles of Mud with Twenty One Pilots?

How do you do fellow kids?

The moon over Baja tonight was so beautiful. Here it is captured by three lenses. Ones an iPhone 14 Pro’s 24mm lens, another is a Canon RF 35mm, and another is a Canon RF 70-200mm cropped.

Researching places to stay and this is the third sentence in the second paragraph in Wikipedia:

In 1968, five Swiss artillery shells accidentally hit it, damaging a few chairs that were sitting outdoors.

I’ve never flown Delta Air Lines, but Britt did last week, and a friend here in Baja is a frequent flyer with the airline, both, unprompted, cited the seat-back entertainment as one of the reasons they would fly them again.

Customer satisfaction win for Delta.

📷 Practice (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @hollie)

I’m a sucker for megapixels, because as much as they really don’t matter to most people - and they really shouldn’t - for me they often mean I’ve got room to crop. More pixels collected means more pixels you can delete, a post-production version of digital zoom if you like.

Other, smarter, and different, people will have different reasons for wanting more pixels, so I’m not here to pass judgement on the feature, just to share my first thoughts and two images I’ve made with the feature.

The feature is actually called IBIS High-resolution shot, apparently, it how it works is that instead of using the stabilisation for stabilising, it uses it to take a bunch of photos whilst moving the sensor, then composes one big image out of it.

So that’s why shooting handheld isn’t a great idea, partially because IBIS (In-Body Image Stabilisation) isn’t enabled, and partially because the collection of photos isn’t all taken at once, they’re taken sequentially.

So as you’ll find in my first demo, the palm trees moving in the wind didn’t quite make it through to the 400-megapixel image in the best quality.

Below you can download the original raw or jpeg, along with the full-resolution jpegs as exported from Lightroom, plus if you want to play with the files yourself you can remix them in Lightroom online.

🪟◾️ El Pescadero in regular 44-megapixel mode - 21.2 megabyte CR3 raw file, 29.8 megabytes processed JPEG from Lightroom - remix it in Lightroom online.

🪟⬛️ El Pescadero in 400-megapixel mode - 122.7 megabytes JPEG original file from the camera, 285.2 megabytes processed JPEG from Lightroom - remix it in Lightroom online.

🍌◾️ Banana in regular 44-megapixel mode - 27.1 megabytes CR3 raw file, 41.4 megabytes processed JPEG from Lightroom - remix it in Lightroom online.

🍌⬛️ Banana in 400-megapixel mode - 85.1 megabyte JPG original file from the camera, 213.6 megabytes processed JPEG from Lightroom - remix it in Lightroom online.

Get the Canon EOS R5 firmware update to 1.8.1 on the Canon website, and reports said you’d need to use Canon’s EOS Utility to import and read the files. That hasn’t been my experience. They’re just regular, really big, JPEGs. If you open up the CF or SD card in Finder, it’s the same file list, and Lightroom handled them fine, if not a little slowly.

So is it worth it? Let’s zoom in. Here’s a close-up of the same banana peel scar in the two images.

If you need a really good photo of a banana then I reckon this might be the feature for you. But if you need a really good photo of a palm frond…

Maybe a medium-format camera is what you need instead?

Ronald Sharp via James Clear’s excellent email, on how friendship transforms us (or any great relationship, really):

It’s not about what someone can do for you, it’s who and what the two of you become in each other’s presence.

“Now this being so, how much happier and better would the world not be if only it could be purged of women?”

From a March 28, 1912, letter to the editor of The Times, signed by C.S.C., one of the doomed. Who turned out to be Clementine Churchill. via Letters of Note

📷 Mirror (@Rori)

Now you’re just a music playback medium that I used to know.

(Found in an op-shop in 2017)

I’m feeling bullish on the new group-messaging app and platform, Wavelength, After reading John Gruber’s review, then using it and joining a group, I think it could replace group chats in other places, but also serve as a platform for new conversations.

If you’re interested, I’ve started a few group chats:

• The Frequent Travellers Society, because I like to talk about travel.
• The Celebrant Institute, you wouldn’t believe it but it’s for celebrants.
• The Apple Nation because I follow Apple like a sport, it’s my favourite hobby.

Jump onboard if you’re interested!

Eleven years ago I asked Britt to marry me, and honestly, it would still be my best idea yet.

I’ve written the story into my Rebels Guide draft chapter on proposals and how I think you should approach asking someone to marry you, now on the blog.

Over a decade ago Vinod Khosla wrote a series of blog posts about artificial intelligence, the forecasts hold up today, and the headline basically tells the whole story: ‘Do we need doctors?’ and ‘Do we need teachers?’

📷 Slice (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @meandering)

Last week Goldie grabbed a big knife off the kitchen bench when I wasn’t looking.

Number of times a well-regulated militia has been required in the USA this year: zero.

Number of times a school student has been wanted to not be shot at this year: way too many.

Dropped a new draft chapter of the Rebels Guide to Getting Married today: choosing a person to marry.

Thinking about the Coolangatta boardriders today

Ted Gioia on becoming a Substack shareholder and why the rest of the business isn’t run like this. Why don’t the creators own the platforms?

“I’d love to live in a world in which the major record labels were owned by musicians. Or the Hollywood film studios by cast and crew. Or those five huge publishing businesses were controlled by writers.”

📷 Prompt (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @moonmehta)

I cannot imagine living in a community where the word “another” preceding “school shooting” isn’t cause for rioting in the streets and major societal change.

I’m just a boy, standing in front of a couple, asking them to make out in front of their grandparents.

(I’m a wedding celebrant)

When Vanilla Ice rapped that he was back with a ‘brand new invention’, he was indeed ‘back’ after his first hit, a cover of Play That Funky Music, but was the invention the lyrics (which is kind of the whole idea of a song), his theft of the Under Pressure bass line, or was he talking about the Ninja Rap that came out the next year?

Oh, this is awkward. The artificial intelligence doesn’t know that the United Kingdom has left the European Union. If I tell it is it going to have an emotional meltdown?

📷 Support (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @JohnAN)

I’ve spent a lot of time at the Los Sagrados Horse Sanctuary over the past few weeks, and the biggest take away for me isn’t just the support we can offer to horses, but the support they offer to us.

The computer at Picfair has decided that these pieces of art are the ones people are most likely to buy from my print store and hang on their wall, prove it wrong.

Printing in most countries worldwide so delivery is usually local which means it’s quick and easy.

art.josh.withers.co

Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Have You Ever Seen the Rain?’ is playing in the cafe and I’m singing ‘Have you ever seen Lorraine?’ and the guy at the next table is not handling it well.

The one where Father Nathan Monk casually suggests that Jesus might of been gay.

The Christians are going to roast you, Monk. Godspeed.

Are we giving the window washers at traffic lights too much money?

22 Jump Street is going to be Kanye’s Mother Theresa moment.

Which cinematic alien or monster do you think my huevos rancheros looks like? I’m seeing Dr. Zoidberg.

I have a confession. I don’t know where to take the book I’m writing. I actually feel kind of stupid for even having thought I should write a book, when all I had was a handful of good ideas. It’s not that I have writer’s block, as much as I’m out of ideas …

📷 Instrument (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @UnfocusedWanderlust)

On Friday I was photographing Los Sagrados for their new website, and a musician came out to perform the flute and percussion for the horses. It was quite a thing to witness.

I’ve spent the last week mulling an idea about Apple and AI then Linus goes and writes a piece which basically is what I was going to write, with the only addition, to keep an eye on Stability AI and Stable Diffusion. Apple has made a few small moves in their direction recently.

My guess is that any Apple LLM/AI move will be under the brand of Siri, albeit an extension or added product to what we know as Siri in early 2023.

Disco tech

Luna and I flexing our frequent flyer privileges this afternoon.

This week in cactus

While Britt’s been away this last fortnight I’ve had heaps of one-on-one time with Goldie while her big sister is at school.

Jose M. Gilgado on embracing a title to help you actually become, that title:

The earlier you use that new term: “athlete,” “writer,” or “artist,” the easier it will be to accept your new identity and act accordingly.

Jon Haidt in Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest:

There was a culture that was encouraged on Tumblr, which was to be able to describe your unique non-normative self. That’s to some extent a feature of modern society anyway. But it was taken to such an extreme that people began to describe this as the “snowflake” (referring to the idea that each snowflake is unique), the person who constructs a totally kind of boutique identity for themselves; then guards that identity in a very, very sensitive way; and reacts in an enraged way when anyone does not respect the uniqueness of their identity. On the other side of the political spectrum, there was the most insensitive culture imaginable: 4chan. The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women while 4Chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men, so there was an increasingly gendered nature to the online conflict. The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred, as often happens in a culture war. The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence. Meanwhile, the young men on 4Chan moved in the opposite direction; they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy. It was out of this reciprocal dynamic that today’s Cancel Culture was born in the early 2010s. Then, in 2013, it escaped from Tumblr into the much larger Twitterverse. Once on Twitter, it went national and even global (at least within the English-speaking countries), producing the mess we all live with today.

Bono and The Edge’s Tiny Desk Concert is beautiful. In particular, the “argument between two mates”, Stuck in Moment You Can’t Get Out Of.

Missing home/Australia/Gold Coast tonight

After reading this, all I want to do is walk the streets of LA.

Helen Garner on happiness in The Guardian:

What is happiness, anyway? Does anybody know? It’s taken me 80 years to figure out that it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm at the top of the ladder you’ve spent your whole life hauling yourself up, rung by rung. It’s more like the thing that Christians call grace: you can’t earn it, you can’t strive for it, it’s not a reward for virtue. It exists all right, it will be given to you, but it’s fluid, it’s evasive, it’s out of reach. It’s something you glimpse in the corner of your eye until one day you’re up to your neck in it. And before you’ve had time to take a big gasp and name it, it’s gone.

Virginia Heffernan in the Wired article on TSMC, “I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory”:

In 1675, A French merchant named Jacques Savary published The Perfect Merchant, a mercantile manual that came to double as a guide for doing commerce around the world. Albert O. Hirschman cites Savary to explain how capitalism, which would have been regarded as little but avarice as recently as the 16th century, became the sanest ambition of humans in the 17th.

Savary strongly believed that international trade would be the antidote to war. Humans can’t conduct polyglot commerce across borders without cultivating an understanding of foreign laws, customs, and cultures. Savary also believed the Earth’s resources and the fellowship created by commerce were God-given. “It’s not God’s will that all human necessities be found in the same place,” Savary wrote. “Divine Providence has dispersed its gifts so that humans will trade together and find that their mutual need to help each other establishes ties of friendship among them.”

📷 Spice (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @cygnoir)

It’s been four months since I’ve blasted this idea across the internet, so here’s my regular reminder that I blog before I post on social, and that blog automatically sends a weekly roundup to anyone that subscribes.

I can’t stop thinking about this RIAA story with Steve Jobs. It’s amazing how fragile - while also strong - the world is. Thank God Rogue Amoeba made it through, I use their software every day.

How to cook soup, by the late Dean Allen:

First, you need some water. Fuse two hydrogen with one oxygen and repeat until you have enough. While the water is heating, raise some cattle. Pay a man with grim eyes to do the slaughtering, preferably while you are away. Roast the bones, then add to the water. Go away again. Come back once in awhile to skim. When the bones begin to float, lash together into booms and tow up the coast. Reduce. Keep reducing. When you think you have reduced enough, reduce some more. Raise some barley. When the broth coats the back of a spoon and light cannot escape it, you are nearly there. Pause to mop your brow as you harvest the barley. Search in vain for a cloud in the sky. Soak the barley overnight (you will need more water here), then add to the broth. When, out of the blue, you remember the first person you truly loved, the soup is ready. Serve.

Shane Claiborne in The Irresistible Revolution:

Once we are actually friends with folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity.

Gurwinder:

The Opinion Pageant: The rise of social media as the primary mode of interaction has caused us to overvalue opinions as a gauge of character. We are now defined more by what we say than what we actually do, and words, unlike deeds, are cheap and easy to counterfeit.

Help me name my new creation which I made for the kids for dinner tonight. It’s a quesadilla with leftover spaghetti bolognaise sauce and despite Luna’s objections, it’s great!

Coming soon to old London Town, pixels that I made in Burleigh Heads.

Rutger Bregman in Humankind:

Cynicism is a theory of everything. The cynic is always right.

Three years ago today I had the wildest, wettest day at work so far. Bringing a wedding forward a day, performing the wedding ceremony I already had for that day, then doing the brought-forward ceremony in the rain, rushing back to Sydney Airport from the Blue Mountains, every store is closed in the airport and we catch the fabled last flight into Queensland before they closed the border.

Three years of hell. Here’s to never getting so silly ever again. You can’t stop people from dying, it’s inevitable, but you can stop people from living.

📷 Court (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @rom)

Most people I respect or look up to journal every day but it’s not a habit I can get into. Tonight I learned about the simple and powerful 1-1-1 journalling method, and then to get nerdy with it, there’s a tutorial on making a Shortcut to make it easier. Then follow this advice from Apple on how to run a Shortcut from a Reminder, I prompted Siri to remind me of it every day at 9pm.

Had coffee at a cafe in Todos Santos today where they hand out 30-minute wifi access codes. They mixed my order up - bringing a cold americano with hot milk when I ordered the reverse - so my 30 minutes ran out in the middle of a text chat. I asked for another code and the barista said “you should have bought food if you wanted more wifi” then walked away!

Flexed my vintage graphic design skills for the local Baja horse sanctuary recently and I’m pretty proud of the work I’ve done.

I used to do web design professionally back in the olden days when computers were stone tablets and Jesus was a boy.

Plus before now you couldn’t find the ranch on Apple or Google Maps properly, and all the search engines and AI chat models didn’t know about them.

Over the coming weeks that will all change as the databases and algorithms catch up.

The horse sanctuary is a registered Mexican charity so they can now take donations online, and they’re on the way to taking horse riding reservations online, selling tickets to events, and also operating as an event venue with online booking etc.

Plus they’ve now got email on their own domain name so they look and feel more professional to donors and grant-giving organisations.

Finally, for the first time in a web design project I got to make all the photography with Britt so we had full creative control of the project.

lossagrados.org

📷 Chance (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @V_)

📷 Insect (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by a@alexink)

📷 Tiny {people} (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @jasonmcfadden)

It was Luna’s turn to decide what we had for breakfast. Her choice? La Esquina, the cafe with pancakes and a playground.

It’s easy to laugh at Rupert Murdoch getting engaged for the fifth time at the ripe age of 92, but at least he’s doing his part to help the wedding industry after Covid. What are you doing? Have you even considered getting married again?

Maryanne Wolf on reading:

Literacy literally changes the human brain. The process of learning to read changes our brain, but so does what we read, how we read and on what we read (print, e-reader, phone, laptop). This is especially important in our new reality, when many people are tethered to multiple screens at any given moment.

She also quotes this which really makes me want to throw the TV in the bin:

When watching a screen, the infant is bombarded with a stream of fast-paced movements, ongoing blinking lights and scene changes, which require ample cognitive resources to make sense of and process. The brain becomes “overwhelmed” and is unable to leave adequate resources for itself to mature in cognitive skills such as executive functions.

You know yo’ve really embedded yourself in a Mexican community when you see a friend riding in the back of a truck on the highway.

📷 Houseplant. Did I do the #mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt right, @jensands)?

(Photo made a few moments ago on the way to get a coffee in Los Cerritos, Baja California Sur)

📷🇲🇽 Analog (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @skarjune)

I made these photos on Playa Cerritos, Baja California Sur, Mexico, on a broken film camera a week ago, then a few days later they were developed in a photo lab at Currumbin Beach, Australia, and I’m posting them today from Las Tunas, Mexico. The wonders of living in a connected world. (Britt has flown back to Australia this week).

📷 Portico (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @annahavrom)

From a snow day in Nashville between Christmas and New Year’s Eve just passed.

Dan Shipper’s representation of AI/GPT as a copilot for the mind harkens back to Steve Jobs talking about computers in 1990 as “a bicycle of the mind”.

Something that takes us past our inherent abilities.

Ansel Adams:

You don’t take a photograph, you make it.

📷 Early (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @krisfredrick) also shared on Pexels.

Everyone move along, there’s nothing to see here.

The “crack” on Josh’s iPhone screen that has occupied his sad mind for the last two hours was actually the smallest dried strand of egg yolk draped across his screen, hard enough and thin enough to seem like a crack to the untrained mind.

If only you could’ve seen the look on my face as I scratched off the scratch like a miracle healer.

A bunch of smart people say we need to learn “‘critical ignoring’ – the ability to choose what to ignore and where to invest our limited attentional capacities.”

📷 Road (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @Dejus)

There’s a saying in Baja that “bad roads bring good people and good roads bring bad people”.

So we keep the ungraded and bumpy dirt roads as an instrument of faith in the neighbours we want.

Alexander Haymen:

“Home is where people notice when you’re not there.”

📷 Patience (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @amit)

📷 Horizon (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @crossingthethreshold)

📷 Connection (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @agilelisa)

The moment I connected with my minutes-old first child and daughter.

📷 Shiny (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @odd)

The second percolator I’ve owned in Mexico. I forgot the first one was on the stove, on heat. Melted all the plastic components.

📷 Gimcrack (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @jafish).

My local tyre shop here in Baja California Sur has real gimcrack vibes.

Friday afternoon in Pescadero, Baja California Sur

Update: July have made good on this error and sent me a replacement bag to where I was in the USA. Thanks for going the extra-mile guys.

I feel so heartbroken when I didn’t keep my word. I struggle as a parent when I make a promise - or a threat - to my girls because I want to make sure I can follow through on my word. When I fail to keep my word in friendships, family, or business, it pains me. It’s why I pore over our website copy and contracts to make sure we can and will do what we promise to do.

So I guess that’s why I’m feeling really disappointed in one of my favourite brands: July.

Flying from San Jose del Cabo to Brisbane through Los Angeles in November last year a wheel came off my Checked Plus July luggage somewhere between Alaska Airlines' check-in at Cabo and the luggage carousel in LAX. I’m no fool, I’m sure one of the gentle giants working in luggage handling delicately placed the bag where it needed to be and the faulty wheel just fell off.

I had travel insurance on the trip, and no doubt Alaska Airlines might have covered it - but I know from experience that airlines are painful about damaged luggage.

So I had one week to make the claim with Alaska Airlines, but I thought travel insurance was the sure bet, but I know they’d ask me if I’d contacted the airline for coverage or the manufacturer for warranty, so I contacted July as I arrived on Australian soil on November 21 - intent to get a quick no from them so I can make an insurance claim, buy a new bag, and be ready to go by the time I leave Australia on December 21. We have one month to solve a hopefully easy problem.

July’s ‘Happiness Team’ replies - and by the way, unless you’re actually going to make people happy, just be a customer service or customer disservice team:

“We would be happy to have replacement wheels sent out for you.”

This I was not expecting!

So I give all the details as required and requested, put to bed any thoughts of wrestling with Alsaka’s premiere airline, and even worse, my travel insurance, and await the wheel.

It shipped from July one month later, as I was boarding my flight to Nashville via Sydney and Dallas. I explicitly communicated that I was in the country for a month and it took a month to send the wheel.

Another wheel was then allegedly shipped to my Mexican address but it’s been three months and all I am left with now is a series of thoughts and no wheels.

• going to “the media” aka social media or the news never works, until it does
• I really like the July suitcases and kind of enjoy having a matching set of five despite one limping
• we’re in Baja California Sur for another month until we go to Nashville and Hawaii then Europe before coming home in August, what am I going to do about this three-wheeled bag.
• I’d really just like another big July bag but do I want to continue to do business with a company that can’t simply keep its word?
• I wish they’d just said no back in November and I would have bought a new bag and they would have never experienced the pain of letting me down.
• Can I even get a July bag in, or to, Mexico before April 8?

You’re a Miracle by Mike McHargue is a book that zings around the inside of my brain all day every day:

You are a miracle because 86 billion neurons in your brain form into thousands of structures and networks, built from a map created over billions of years to understand the world you live in. But sometimes, you are a pain in your ass because all these networks are running a playbook that’s been around a lot longer than you have. The cells in your body have survived through the eons by eating every delicious calorie they come across, allowing fear to make them run, and using anger to make them fight for their lives.

March 10, 1976, the first and last time “Articulate speech was transmitted intelligibly” over a telephone. For the 147 years since inarticulate speech transmitted poorly has been the theme.

📷 Ritual (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @drewbelf)

Our morning coffee. While we’re in El Pescadero, it’s from La Comuna Espresso Bar at Mini Super Munchies.

Keith Richards:

To me, the main thing about living on this planet is to know who the hell you are and be real about it. That’s the reason I’m still alive.

📷 Together (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @sherif)

Our little nomadic family, our most recent photo all together in Australia, in October last year.

Bryan Jáuregui quotes Greg Schredder regarding Rancho Gaspareño, Baja California Sur, just south of Todos Santos, emphasis and photos mine:

Rancho Gaspareño was named after a Spanish galleon that went aground on the point, the Gaspareño. It was one of the so-called Manila galleons, Spanish ships that sailed between the Philippines and Acapulco for 250 years, bringing spices, silks and other luxuries from the far east to New Spain. All these galleons sailed the Pacific coast of Baja on their way to Acapulco, so naturally enough the area became riddled with pirates, many of them English and Dutch.

There are many tales of buried pirate treasure in the area, and local school groups still come to explore the cave at Rancho Gaspareño each year to tap into the lore. Treasure hunters have reason for optimism; in 1974 when the road from La Paz to the ferry terminal at Pichilingue was being built, a pirate chest of plundered loot was discovered by road workers.

I think of this part of the Baja coastline as the forgotten area. People drive past Rancho Gaspareño going a hundred miles an hour on the new 4-lane highway and have no idea of the history of the area.

The Guaycura and Pericue Indians were the original inhabitants before the Jesuit’s arrival in 1697, and they were essentially wiped out by the time the Jesuits left in 1768. The Jesuits built their theocracy based on a promise to the King of Spain to get rid of the pirates who were plundering his ships, and the pirates faded away with the demise of the Manila galleons in 1815. Dominican Padre Gabriel González had a ranch near Gaspareño from 1825 to 1850, and the tobacco, rum, sugar, corn, and livestock he produced there made him the richest man in Baja California. From his ranch the padre engaged in espionage and guerilla warfare during the Mexican-American war of 1846-1848, and – thanks in part to the Padre – Mexico won a major victory near Gaspareño (but lost the war). By 1855 the Padre had lost his political backing and left Baja for good. For the next one hundred years entrepreneurs made fortunes in the sugar cane industry with fields in areas like Gaspareño, but in the 1950s a severe drought and price drop lead to the demise of the industry; the last sugar processing plant closed in 1974. In that same year the trans peninsular highway made its way to Todos Santos, bringing new life to the town, and in 1985 renowned artist Charles Stewart arrived from Taos, planting the seed for Todos Santos’ current incarnation as an artists’ colony. It remains an agricultural center and surfing hotspot, only now it is firmly on the radar of major developers.

Now we all just speed past at 120km/hr on the four-lane highway and wonder how much the owner wants for it (shhh, $12M).

Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic writes on the vindication of Ask Jeeves:

Many years later, it seems I owe Jeeves an apology: He had the right idea all along.

For all the hype, when I stare at these new chatbots, I can’t help but see the faint reflection of my former besuited internet manservant. In a sense, Bing and Bard are finishing what Ask Jeeves started.

📷 Early morning beach walks with my three girls (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt ‘walk’ suggested by @lwdupont)

When dating apps match you up and ChatGPT writes your wedding vows, it’s like you’re part of a high-tech breeding program for computers. We’re like surrogate parents for algorithms, helping to create the next generation of AI love stories.

Ten whale soup off Todos Santos yesterday 🐋📷🚁

Just a wee little note that imma be on NBC News tonight from 8pm NY time talking about weddings with Gadi Schwartz in case you hadn’t heard enough from me lately

Ed Catmull:

We are meaning-making creatures who read other people’s subtle clues just as they read ours.

Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook engineer:

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.

Number three surprised me: The Best Nikon Camera For Wedding Photography In 2023.

From On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King 📚

“Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.”

📷 Whole (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @val)

A whole lot of whale as I saw it from my aerial camera yesterday.

Well, that’s a wrap on another day of pretending like I know what’s happening.

Because I couldn’t get my head clear to write this morning I worked on a cover for the book instead.

If you’d walk past this in a shop and stop, like this.

Would you buy it? Let me know why.

My greatest fear for my kids and for future generations is what it means to create within and around such specific analytics being available.

I (unfortunately) have precise readings of how many people read and view my work. Where they come from and where they don’t. How many followers, likes, and shares each social network allows me.

Honestly, it’s depressing and it is the biggest impediment to my creative work.

Efforts to remove the signals from my life have been mostly meaningless and sometimes even have adversely affected business, revenue, and our family’s supply.

I am most aware of this because my career as a creator started when its audience was measured by handwritten diaries, radio-listening diaries completed at the end of the day where the surveyed people would report on which radio stations they listened to - in quarter-hour blocks - throughout the day, usually reporting at the end of the day. Somehow entire industries and careers like mine were built on the back of less than 0.1% of the population writing in a book for a few weeks a year was representative of the entire local population, and we all took this as gospel.

Now I know exactly that one person watched one of my YouTube videos of me talking about a chapter of my book, and they didn’t even finish, and I also know that my silly Instagram Reel of my four-year-old daughter with a wavy video effect has been seen by over 100,000 people.

And even if we think that 100,000 people is a great reach, it’s only 0.00125% of the global population. Is 0.001% reach within our content goals this month?

With the slightest margin of error, we can tell you that somewhere between 25 to 35 visit our business website every day, but somehow we make enough bookings to provide for our family.

I think about the New York Times article recently published where I was quoted and our websites linked to, and it looks like pretty much zero of the article’s readers clicked those links. I wonder how many people actually read the article which had taken many hours of at least one journalist’s and one editor’s time to research, write, and publish. The most promotion I witnessed of the article itself was a small text link at the bottom of the NY Times front page. Do people read that far down? Do they click those links? Did anyone even read that article?

Things aren’t bad, but there was a mysterious time only recently when you could broadcast a radio program and have no idea how many people heard it. You could print a newspaper, and obviously, you would have some idea of how many papers were printed, but who read which articles? You never knew! It was beautiful. You could write an article you thought was worth writing, that the editor thought was worth publishing, and you would just send it off to the printer along with the headline news about that scandal and the other story about how politicians are terrible.

Do we still create beautiful things if we believe that no one will see them?

George Berkeley wrote in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge,

The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived; the trees therefore are in the garden… no longer than while there is somebody by to perceive them.

If you suppose that no one might perceive your creation, do you even create it in the first place?

Are we ok with being unpopular? Are our kids ok with it?

If you asked me I’d say I am ok with it, if only because it’s my reality. But the truth is that this reality also affects my ability to create. I second-guess myself, wondering if it’s even worth clicking the shutter button or opening up the laptop to write a chapter of a book that will most likely be purchased by only my close friends and read by even fewer.

As I’ve published this piece, and added a featured image of me trying to figure out why Morgan’s Nikon camera wasn’t working (if you know, you know) I’ve realised that all of these thoughts of mine are before and almost exclusionary of artificial intelligence and large language models.

Creating really is doomed isn’t it …

📷 Engineering (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @ridwan)

These are my DJI microphones, and as a travelling nerd I really appreciate how they’ve been engineered, all to stay within the little charging case.

📷 Tile (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @thedimpulse)

Luna, nine months old, taking a breather on the floor of a Tuscan church.

📷 Tile (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @thedimpulse)

Photo made outside a small Italian restaurant in Brisbane.

Talking to a lovely old Mexican bloke in Cabo San Lucas and he asks where we live, I say Pescadero.

He says, ‘I love Pescadero because it looks like a Mexican fishing village but it’s full of white people!’

So apparently my whiteness is like some kind of gravitational force.

📷 Zip (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @miraz)

zip /zip/

verb

1. fasten with a zipper.

2. move at high speed.

Local Baja news includes the taco price index

If you look closely you’ll find yours truly’s name mentioned in the New York daily rag today.

U.S. petrochemicals giant Dow Inc and the Singapore government said they were transforming old sneakers into playgrounds and running tracks. Reuters put that planted AirTags inside 11 pairs of donated shoes and found them at Indonesian flea markets instead.

📷 Solitude (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @circustiger)

I made this photo in Yosemite National Park.

The most interesting (to me) new app/social net-ugh-something-work is Artifact. It’s from the guys who created Instagram but it’s like a ‘TikTok for articles/blog posts/news.

I personally would much prefer to read than watch a video, so this is my kind of network.

I fell victim to a phishing scam yesterday and man, I haven’t felt shame like that in a while. Here’s what happened, and how you could avoid it if you weren’t an idiot like me.

Anthony Bourdain in 1999 before he was that chef guy everyone knew, writing ‘Don’t Eat Before Reading This’ in the New Yorker:

“Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals.”

I don’t wish to cause the editors at Atlas Obscura any stress, but why is this not titled ‘The God’s Must Be Thirsty (for Red Fanta)’

Islands, they’re always in the last place you look.

Celebrating Wayne Shorter (1933-2023) with his 2018 open letter co-authored with Herbie Hancock:

“We are all pieces in a giant, fluid puzzle, where the smallest of actions by one puzzle piece profoundly affects each of the others. You matter, your actions matter, your art matters.”

📷 Weather (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @pcora)

Photo made in Newport Beach looking at Catalina on Saturday just passed.

📷 Secure (#mbmar Micro Blog March photo challenge prompt suggested by @mandaris)

They got me by talking about my main domain name and my main domain host. Even though it’s not hosted at VentraIP. I’m just so used to having to correct payments there.

I didn’t even notice the bung I in VentraIP, the bad email address, the bad domain.

I’ve locked the two credit cards I fed them. Feel like an idiot.

As Abe Simpson said, and it will happen to yoouuuuu.

One of the little joys of being great at your art is inspiring others to take part in it. So often I am asked how to become a celebrant, that I have finally published my little eight-part guide on how to become a celebrant at the ever-so-smart domain name, becomeacelebrant.au

A letter from a freelancing poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, to her publisher, Poetry magazine, with the business inspiration we all could take, from Letters of Note.

I’m a sucker for a crazy plan of any genre, but a crazy plan to save newspapers, I’m all in, Ted.

This line from the late Rich Mullins is my inspiration for writing, but gosh it’s hard sometimes

God spoke to Balaam through his ass, and God’s been speaking through them ever since.

📷 Four frames from El Pescadero, Baja California Sur, today

📷🚁🇲🇽 Four aerial frames from Playa Los Cerritos, Baja California Sur

📷✈️🇺🇸 Four frames out the window of AA2171

📷✈️🇺🇸 Four frames from LAX on Sunday

📷 Four frames from Newport Beach this past weekend

Stephen King in On Writing:

If you’re just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television’s electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.

Debt by David Graeber:

If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank.

Hey, don’t be alarmed or anything but the President of Mexico, the head honcho, the big guy in charge, has tweeted that one of his engineers has taken a photo of an elf. Just another day south o’ the border.

I’ve just had my peak Mexican moment. I delivered a dad joke in Spanish and it was perfect.

I’m at our local sushi restaurant ordering takeaway dinner and whilst waiting at the bar they offer me a margarita, and you don’t say no to a margarita in Baja.

I finish it, and he gestured towards my empty glass to which I reply “esta roto” which means “it’s broken” whilst inspecting the bottom of my glass, implying that the drink must have fallen out of the bottom.

He laughs, I laugh, I’m now a Mexican dad and can never leave.

If you want surf and snow in the same trip, I can definitely recommend Los Angeles today.

Drove past this park today and noticed something interesting on Google Maps at (33.6621623, -117.8775484).

I wonder how many aircraft the Google Maps aerial photographers have captured?

Now I’ve just got to hope the people writing memos or sending emails regarding Bel’s Guide don’t stop me.

Do you think Carls Sr. is proud of his son?

This is good content, we should podcast about it.

Visited the Japanese mothership (aka Canon campus) in Los Angeles and asked them to clean my cameras and lenses.

Steve Jobs in 1984 spotting a Macintosh in the wild for the first time.

I couldn’t begin to imagine the what he was feeling seeing a product he knew so intimately, that his team had worked on endlessly, to see from the street it just being used by someone in an office.

I tried but it turns out you can’t go Out before you go In

It’s so special to be in LA to watch the city fall to pieces with my own eyes.

‘dat light + reflection

Los Angeles bound for a few days, thankfully it’s raining so we won’t stay long enough for it to make us soft.

Goldie, taking full advantage of the Shatner Seat

What a time to be alive

Pure second child energy.

I’m going to start sneaking in to her room while she sleeps and bottling some of that excess second child energy and selling it to soldiers and personal trainers who need to get hyped up.

Hey everyone, make sure you update your … checks notes … Apple power cord …

Mexican Marines

Sunday // Playa Cerritos, BCS

Mark Twain’s use of a typewriter. I wonder if AI-writing is today’s typewriter?

Steven Pressfield on going deep:

Everyone wants to succeed immediately and without pain or effort. Or they love to write books about how to write books, rather than actually writing a book that might actually be about something. Bad advice is everywhere. Build a following. Establish a platform. Learn how to scam the system. In other words, do all the surface stuff and none of the real work it takes to actually produce something of value. The disease of our times is that we live on the surface. We’re like the Platte River, a mile wide and an inch deep. Real work and real satisfaction come from the opposite of what the web provides. They come from going deep into something - the book you’re writing, the album, the movie -and staying there for a long, long time.

What’s the go with Mayor Humdinger? Is Foggy Bottom even a real township? Why does the Paw Patrol continue to rescue this evil man?

Tres es compañía (three frames of three humpback whales shot a few minutes ago in El Pescadero, Baja California Sur, Mexico)

Watched the sun set over the Pacific tonight as humpback whales came right up close to the shore so they could scratch their backs on the sand bars. What a time to be alive!

Wednesday frames

When you look down at just the right time // whale watching in El Pescadero, Baja California Sur

El Pescadero seafood stall

I heard you were into Jesus, so I got you some Jesus

For Britt’s 33rd birthday we went to CDMX, Mexico City, and painted the town pink.

Pro Tip: if you’re ever asked what the largest city in North America is, it’s not in the USA. It’s Mexico City.

To celebrate Britt’s birthday we took a walking food tour of Coyoacán in Mexico City with Sabores Mexico Food Tours. 10 points to our guide, Enya, for an excellent tour and secretly arranging a little birthday treat for Britt.

Mexico City’s zoo is free to access, and weirdly, equal parts cool and scary. I’m Australia animal enclosures are 1) large and spacious, and 2) very, very, very securely separate from humans. It’s very hard for humans to touch or be close to animals.

But at Zoológico de Chapultepec I could very much just jump into the lion’s area.

Every day in Mexico I’m confronted with the stark difference between Australia’s “let’s assume you’re stupid, we’ll try and stop you from dying” modus operandi to Mexico’s “let’s assume you’re smart, we’re not going to try and stop you dying”, which honestly, from an intellectual point of view really appeals to me.

Freddie deBoer on SubStack:

“The 90s were better. They just were. I’m sorry, but it’s science.”

In a world consumed by the idea of creating content, Burt Bacharach created the most evergreen content we’ve seen in recent times: “what the world needs now is love, sweet love.”

Most people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing.

They imitate others, go with the flow, and follow paths without making their own.

They spend decades in pursuit of something that someone convinced them they should want, without realising that it won’t make them happy.

Don’t be those people. Don’t be those people in planning your wedding.

Reject the status quo. Reject the norm.

Embrace who you are. Embrace the idea that people like you two get married like ‘this’! Embrace your weirdness, your uniqueness, the things that make the two of you a couple.

This is the way of the rebel.

This is the way you’ll find in The Rebel’s Guide To Getting Married.

I’m unsure how many more Om Malik blog posts I can read before I trade in my Canon EOS R5 for a Leica. Please stop taunting me, @Onmyom@mstdn.social :)

Every day I experience another “Mexico moment” and I am hesitant to share them publicly because I don’t want to ruin things here, nor be a stupid gringo. But today was great.

We bought a car back in October but it hasn’t been registered to me yet because to register a car you need a drivers license and to get a drivers license you need residency plus proof of address and a blood test.

Proof of residence is hard because addresses aren’t really a thing in regional Mexico so you use electricity bills and most electricity bills are in the name of a corporation because individuals can’t own properties.

So I find out last week I can get a letter of residence instead of using an electricity bill.

It takes me like four different government offices to find the right person in a back office of an office that is full of young people talking and laughing and this lady agrees to help. We’re talking the back office of the back office of a building without a sign near the building I thought I had to go to.

I need this important letter and she drafts it up, spells my name wrong, we correct it, and then the big boss of the department needs to sign it. By big boss I mean “President of the Municipality”.

He’s busy talking to important people.

She sits there for like three minutes clearly thinking it all through and then she just forges his signature, smiles at me, and hands me the letter.

I get a blood test from a local doctor and I’m now a licensed Mexican driver.

Policy and procedure means everything and nothing over here.

Wednesday in Todos Santos

Wednesday in El Pescadero

If Marie Kondo can give up on having a tidy house you can give up on a whole range of crap. Celebrate quitting, cancelling and giving up. Not everything or everyone needs to be driven to the edge of sanity.

This is on the menu as Fresh Water or Agua Fresco.

Sometime before now Mexicans weren’t taking to actual water that was fresh and without watermelon straws, so smart boffins in Mexico City mixed in some fruit and sweetener, and hey presto, fresh waters and an obesity problem!

Ed Catmull in Creativity, Inc.:

“We aren’t aware that the majority of what we think we see is actually our brain filling in the gaps.”

Nick Cave:

“Rather than feel impotent and useless, you must come to terms with the fact that as a human being, you are infinitely powerful, and take responsibility for this tremendous power. Even our smallest actions have the potential for great change, positively or negatively, and the way in which we all conduct ourselves within the world means something. You are anything but impotent, you are, in fact, exquisitely and frighteningly dynamic, as are we all, and with all respect, you have an obligation to stand up and take responsibility for that potential. It is your most ordinary and urgent duty.”

A smart Australian government would’ve sorted their colonising the indigenous population problems out before the Internet.

UnClobber by Colby Martin 📚

“In the essentials, unity; in the nonessentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”

From Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull 📚

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

D.H. Lawrence:

“the world fears a new experience more than anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences.”

Anthony shared this signed cover art in today’s edition of The Sizzle and very few images can conjure up so much nostalgia. I still remember visiting the shareware kiosk (computer in a box) at Video Ezy and downloading the shareware version of Doom onto two 3.5" floppy disks.

In You’re a Miracle (and a Pain in the Ass) by Mike McHargue 📚:

“You are a miracle because 86 billion neurons in your brain form into thousands of structures and networks, built from a map created over billions of years to understand the world you live in. But sometimes, you are a pain in your ass because all these networks are running a playbook that’s been around a lot longer than you have. The cells in your body have survived through the eons by eating every delicious calorie they come across, allowing fear to make them run, and using anger to make them fight for their lives.”

Spotting a scam email

The most Mexican thing I’ve seen yet is a guy who has a table to sell so he’s just carried it around the neighbourhood singing out if anyone wants to buy a table. Take that, Zuckerberg, and your stupid Marketplace.

Don’t believe everything AI tells you. This bio sounds right, but it’s not. From what I understand I’ve never been in Vogue, The Knot, or Martha Vomit Stewart Weddings. I am not a founding member of the AFCC, and I’ve not been Sydney-based for over a decade. I also don’t write my couple’s vows.

Dan Shipper writes:

“Honestly, I’m usually annoyed when something gets trendy”

and I felt seen. So his article Permission to Be Excited About AI obviously spoke to me.

From Love Matters More by Jared Byas 📚

“Social media encourages the myth that who we are is defined by the opinions we type. But the older I get, the less interested I am in how well people can script their beliefs in front of a computer and the more interested I am in how tenaciously they go about grinding out their moral existence. I’m impressed when someone can get up every single day, determined to be a better human being than he or she was yesterday. Typing out what we “stand for” is easy. But loving well isn’t. I am not down on typing out our opinions—clearly. I’m only down on thinking that typing in and of itself constitutes an ethical life. May we stop thinking that becoming the kind of person we want to be is as easy as typing “me too” at those we agree with and “stupid people” at those we don’t. That’s a distraction from the real work of being human. And I’m ready to work.”

The duo behind Instagram - who sold for good coin and then left Instagram/Facebook in 2018 - have a new thing and it’s right in my ballpark. Think TikTok’s algorithmic feed but for text: artifact.news.

The many branches of the Fediverse by Per Axbom.

Do you know the most disappointing thing about the United States of America?

That the entire narrative of and about the country is defined by a small handful of topics recycled so quickly that outsiders often don’t even know which Police Officer killing, which mass shooting, which disappointing President, or which sexually abusive old white male you’re all angry about this week. It’s hard to keep up, and you need new stories. Not new fake stories so the rest of the world thinks you’re cool again. You need new truths so the new stories just kinda flow pretty easily.

Or be like Iceland. No-one ever hears about Iceland unless it’s a photo of some cool landscape.

Luna just asked Britt, “will you ever kill me, mummy?” And honestly, at the age of four it’s impressive that she’s already assembling friends and enemies lists, and that I got an auto-invite to the friends list but her mother required some investigation first.

Ive always secretly thought that when I reached 1 million downloads on Unsplash I’d stop posting there.

But as I passed the landmark this week I realised that sometimes we set silly goals about silly things.

I still don’t know why I share my art there, but I know I get more messages, emails, and commissioned paid work from Unsplash than I do from any other of my networks or communities.

unsplash.com/@joshwith…

It might be 8yrs late, but you’re finally getting my book: The Rebel’s Guide To Getting Married is coming in 2023. It’s a book about planning a wedding with intention and purpose, written by yours truly, Oz’s most hated celebrant & I’m writing live on my wedding blog.

Every time Buzz Aldrin comes up in the news or conversation I think of this Rhys Darby standup piece from 15-odd years ago. Starts 2:30 in.

Current status: forgot to put coffee in the percolator.

Throwback to that time ten years ago when I had awesome not-grey hair

Judging by the many different recordings I’m hearing and also seeing pop up on the web of Rick Rubin doing the circuit to promote his new 📚 book, The Creative Act, he’s much better in conversation than the written word. I’m reading the book and I’m struggling to stay tuned in.

📚 The Art of Growing Up by John Marsden:

“A friend of mine told the story of driving along a country road one day with her little son, when he remarked: ‘Look at the beautiful tree, Mummy.’ She replied: ‘Yes, it’s a manna gum.’ There was a long silence from the back seat, broken at last by her child asking: ‘So is there a name for everything, then?’”

Current status: horizontal at El Pescadero

E.B. White in Here Is New York:

“New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.”

If you’re wondering how Starlink is going, at my local Todos Santos (Baja California Sur, Mexico) post office today there 16 new Starlink packages and they say that every day there’s “lots.”

Why is no-one talking about how most movies are just made up in people’s brains?!

Sad. The person typing this has finally given up on the dream of eternal youth and is scaling back his dream of More Space to Default.

Bill Bishop on living in DC.

Popped up to say hi then went back down again

Hola

I’ve lived around the ocean my whole life and I’ve never seen the ocean as angry and ferocious as I have at Todos santos, Baja California Sur, this week.

In so many ways existing on earth has never been better with threat of war or famine never being lower for so many of us. But for 339 million people in 2023 things aren’t so rosy. The New Humanitarian writes: Why these 10 humanitarian crises demand your attention now.

Currently reading: The Creative Act by Rick Rubin 📚

Rick Rubin is the guest on episode 649 of the Tim Ferris show and this is one of those podcasts you really want to listen to.

“Look for what you notice that no-one else sees.”

Robert Henri’s quote is quoted and man, this is sitting with me all day every day:

“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state that makes art inevitable”

This is a good listen.

Somehow both our girls have learned to pose like this and I have no idea how, or why, or where it’s from.

Craig Hockenberry, of Icon Factory and Twitterific fame, unloads on Space Karen.

In 1978, neurologist Dr. James Austin proposed that there are 4 types of luck:

(1) Blind Luck (2) Luck from Motion (3) Luck from Awareness (4) Luck from Uniqueness

Sahil details them in this tweet thread.

Passport Photos is a very fun and cool photo series by Max Siedentopf.

Weird ass reason why Morgan Freeman and sailors wear two earrings

MORGAN FREEMAN on why he wears two earrings…

“The truth is, these are worth just enough for someone to buy me a coffin if I die in a strange place. That’s why sailors used to wear them and that’s why I do.” pic.twitter.com/uXKP1sCzsY

— Michael Warburton (@MichaelWarbur17) January 10, 2023

Steve Jobs on how asking for help is a superpower:

“I’ve never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help. I called up Bill Hewlett (founder of HP) when I was 12 years old. He answered the phone himself. I told him I wanted to build a frequency counter. I asked if he had any spare parts I could have. He laughed. He gave me the parts. And he gave me a summer job at HP working on the assembly line putting together frequency counters. I have never found anyone who said no, or hung up the phone. I just ask. Most people never pick up the phone and call. And that is what separates the people who do things, versus the people who just dream about them. You have to act.”

Polina Pompliano with 15 People on the Most Important Question They’ve Ever Been Asked.

“Would you do this if you weren’t being paid?”

I’ve never felt more inadequate and stupid as a person whilst reading this essay and list of recommendations for writing good English prose by David Bentley Hart.

My favourite fiction/not-really-not-fiction book of 2022 was Russian Sleeper Cell by Nathan Monk 📚

Reading Publishers Weekly top twenty-five bestseller list is something I’m finding depressing, not because of the content of the list, but the numbers. So few books are being read. Props to Colleen Hoover, someone I’d never heard of before now, for having eight books on that list, it sounds like romance still sells.

It’s been twenty years since Bill Gates expressed his frustration at his own operating system and the team behind it on how hard it was to install Windows Movie Maker and honestly, computers are only slightly more useable today.

Ok then, photorapture it is

In every intellectual relationship there’s the person who recommends podcast episodes, and there’s the other person who doesn’t even listen to the recommended episodes.

In my and Scott’s relationship, I’m the recommending party.

But as is the fashion of the other person the two episodes of the one podcast that Scott recommended I listen this week, this is a banger.

Hallelujah, an episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History, is possibly one of the most thought provoking 30 minutes of my life.

The single idea that at the point of release, the moment of deliverance, the second you ship this creative work, that it’s more than likely not done yet, terrifies me.

We live a life today where I do a thing and it’s done and we move on.

Contemplating that Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah took the journey documented in this podcast, I’m going to sit with this for so long.

Please listen to this, then message me and let me know what you thought.

The Home Owners Association is not going to be happy

🏡 at El Pescadero, Baja California Sur, Mexico

I’m not going to lie, I don’t have to hug everyone I marry when I first see them at the ceremony, but I want to.

Alani & Ethan #marriedbyjosh on the Gold Coast with the Elopement Collective

Luna asked me to play some fairy songs. So I search for such a thing in Apple Music.

Seth Godin in his post, The platform and the curator, on the difference between current platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and traditional platforms like radio, newspapers, and TV:

“Platform leaders understood that their decision to promote something instead of everything was a key part of their job.”

Friday afternoon at Pescadero

My friend Jay has made a really beautiful documentary about being a digital nomad, remote working around the Arctic Circle.

Joe Mayall in There’s No “Woke Capitalism.” Only Capitalism:

“Profit: By any means necessary.”

“Companies seek profit. Everything else is just a means to an end.”

The spare tyre for our car sits up and under the body of the car, under the front seats. Myself and the tyre guy took quite a while to figure this all out.

Quick little shoutout for a new series of daily/weekly emails I’ve recently subscribed to and actually really like. The formatting in the email is really nice, as is the writing and content: Semafor.

Just between you and me most of the time when I’m alone and approach the car as the driver in the USA or Mexico I approach the passenger side accidentally so I still open the passenger door, pretend to look for something, then proceed to the driver’s side of the car.

Meghan O’Gieblyn in The Believer posits that AI is a new god, the god of Dataism.

“Science was supposed to have banished God, but he keeps turning up in our latest technologies. He is the ghost lurking in our data sets, the cockroach hiding beneath the particle accelerator.”

Going on to this banger:

“Just as according to Christianity we humans cannot understand God and His plan, so Dataism declares that the human brain cannot fathom the new master algorithms.”

Thirteen years ago I read this on Seth Godin’s blog and it’s sat with me every day since:

“One option is to struggle to be heard whenever you’re in the room … another is to be the sort of person who is missed when you’re not. The first involves making noise. The second involves making a difference.”

All I want to in this life is make a difference. Nothing in me wants to make a noise.

My 2023 challenge is to get really good at modern search engine optimisation, which is pretty different to 2019’s SEO. So I’ve got a new project using Superstash, and it’s a celebrant directory. How original, Josh.

You look at this photo and think it’s some kind of grand cathedral in Rome. It’s a storage room in Ravello.

Every week, sometimes every day, Britt and my inbox is filled with couples worrying about what happens if it rains, or if it’s too hot, or if something something. All valid worries, but they don’t stress us out too much because we always find a way. We’ll always find a storage room on the Amalfi Coast that also just happens to be an epic location for your ceremony.

That’s what we do. We look for solutions, not problems.

Any chimp can find a problem. We find a storage room, move all the things being stored, and then walk you into a sacred place where you can exchange vows intimately, in private, with joy and peace.

This is Raimie and Kelly on the Amalfi Coast in Villa Cimbrone with the Elopement Collective and Joey & Jase.

16 years ago today the way I viewed the world changed completely. I can still remember seeing that little lump of plastic and metal in Steve Jobs’s hand, watching a video stream, and thinking that everything changed. Today that remains ever so.

I believe that you can measure the meaning of something by imagining taking it away. What would life be like if we didn’t have it? Like earlier today I mused to a friend that if a certain media property disappeared, no one would notice.

Imagine a world without the iPhone. You might point to Android phones, but 16 years ago today the team developing Android ‘started over’ and despite the common argument that iPhone copies Android’s leadership, on that day, Android took iPhone’s lead.

Even comparing the two, Android was just a software platform under development. iPhone was hardware and software. Not long after it became a software development platform and the world as we know it today changed completely. Services you take for granted were enabled that day.

16 years is nothing special, but every year when this date rolls around, and the subsequent anniversaries, I reflect how years later we’ve not experienced a tectonic shift like that since.

“Make something wonderful and put it out there." You sure did, Apple. You sure did.

When you elope in a far-away destination you’re choosing a very different vibe and moment than a domestic elopement. It firmly places your ceremony - the beginning of your marriage - in the middle of an adventure. Between customs, packing, flights, delays, transfers, language barriers, different foods and weather, it’s impossible to not revel in the moment as you take a deep breath of that fresh international air and exchange vows with me and the @elopementcollective in some epic location like Italy, Iceland, or anywhere in-between.

I’m up for a European wedding adventure any day of the week, but in June and July 2024 I’ll be there with The Elopement Collective plus House of Lucie and Jason Corroto.

More info available in my email my name at my last name dot co or withers.co/europe.

This is me with Stuart and Chelsea outside of some epic villa in Tuscany, Italy, with Jason Lucas a few years ago. Epic trip.

A few days ago I ordered a latest generation Kindle Oasis and a new Kindle Scribe with the intention of only keeping one to replace my six year old Kindle Oasis who’s battery barely lasted a day.

Today a UPS driver picks one up to take it back home to Bezos, and I’m keeping the Kindle Scribe.

Why?

Kindle Scribe Pros:

• Nice and big
• USB-C charging
• notepad and pencil input for note taking and signing paperwork
• so big
• all the Remarkable 2 you want with the benefit of all the Kindle you want
• new fancy product

Kindle Scribe Cons:

• so very big
• no buttons
• too big
• a little heavy
• Kindle OS is still crappy and salesy
• new product, 1.0 version sadness

I have a long and beautiful history of catching up with friends in weird and wonderful places. I just had lunch with someone I’m pretty sure I met in the first month or so of my radio career, about 20 years ago, in a Mexican restaurant in Franklin, Tennessee.

The rubbish being pushed by Instagram Reels is astonishingly bad. Jacob Sweet unveils some of the nonsense in the New Yorker.

Currently reading: Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters by Meg Meeker 📚

I’m only two pages into this book and already I’m sensing something important. Good parenting isn’t the theatre most think it is. It’s in the substance, not the theatre.

Steve Jobs in 1990:

“My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person. And if we really go back and we examine, you know, did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years out in the future what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it? Of course not. Leonardo was the artist, but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. He knew about pigments, knew about human anatomy. And combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the exceptional result. And there is no difference in our industry. The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.”

Elderly lady walking her dog with a Bluetooth speaker blaring Li’l Jon’s 2002 banger, Get Low. Stay cool, Nashville.

Dear the United States of America,

I would like to submit my application to become your house’s Speaker. I’m of the understanding than you do not currently have a speaker, and you are in need of a speaker. It just so happens that speaking is one of the few things on this planet that I am really good at.

Attached is photographic evidence of me at to Kirsten and Todd’s wedding speaking quite well, you will notice them as much as I speak really good, I also slide into the background of the story if the photographer uses the correct aperture.

For references, please see my Google and Facebook page reviews, where I maintain an almost five star rating, with the exception of a few random spam accounts that have left me one star reviews without any reason.

It is possible that me being an Australian currently residing in Mexico may be an issue, but for the next week, I am still in Tennessee. If you are willing to give me a green card, I am willing to speak at your house.

I am also available for weddings, parties, anything.

Yours sincerely, the next speaker of the United States of America, Josh “Married By Josh” Withers.

Tasted fine Kentucky Angel’s Envy bourbon with a Great Indiana Man™️

Roadtrip to meet an old friend for the first time

Naval in Don’t Rely on Credibility Stamps:

“It’s a priesthood. You’re only allowed to say what the priests have approved, and you can only say that if you are a priest, and the priests get to decide who’s a priest.”

Just discovered my favourite parable:

A businessman is sitting on the beach of a small fishing village when he sees a fisherman approach the shore with his daily haul. Impressed by the quality of the fish, the businessman asks the fisherman how long it took him to bring in his catch.

“Just a short while,” the fisherman replies.

“Why don’t you stay out longer to catch more fish?” the businessman asks.

“Because this is all I need.”

“But then what do you do with your time?”

“I sleep late, catch a few fish, play with my kids, take a nap with my wife, and then join my buddies in town to drink wine and play guitar,” the fisherman responds.

The businessman is shocked. He explains that he has an MBA, and that if the fisherman follows his advice, he could help him grow his business. “You could buy a bigger boat,” the businessman says, “and use the proceeds to open your own cannery.”

“Then what?” the fisherman asks.

“You could move to the city to open a distribution center.”

“And then what?”

“You could expand your business internationally and eventually take your company public,” the businessman says. “When the time is right, you could sell your shares and become very rich.”

“And then what?”

“Well, then you can retire, move to a small fishing village, sleep late, catch a few fish, play with your kids, take naps with your wife, and join your buddies in town to drink wine and play guitar.”

The fisherman smiles at the businessman and continues down the beach.

Better times

This nugget from Cory Muscara is sitting well with my soul today: “We often need to get out of alignment with the rest of the world to get back into alignment with ourselves.”

My second Amazon Kindle is a Kindle I’ve owned since late 2016, my first generation Kindle Oasis. It’s been a solid travel companion but after six years its battery barely lasts a day and I’m hot for something new. I’ve been waiting for a 2022/2023 release of a new Oasis and when the Scribe was released I started thinking this might not occur.

So while I was in native Amazon territory where deliveries are quick and returns are easily done at Whole Foods, I thought I’d buy both - the latest Kindle Oasis and the new Kindle Scribe - and return the one I liked the least.

🦇

🐸

This bloke was just chilling but when he saw I had a camera he came and stood next to his sign as if he was at an animal trade show manning a booth

Monkey business

Live footage of me trying to find a better deal on insurance by comparing deals available on the market

Breaking news: not all flamingos are pink

My favourite Apple Watch feature is New Year’s Day

I’ve assembled a top 10 list of top 10 lists I’m paying attention to this year:

1-10: .

Noah Smith in The internet wants to be fragmented:

“Perhaps someday the human race will be ready to become one collective consciousness. But the experiment of the 2010s shows that this day is not today. Let the internet once more be an escape — a place where you can find your people and be happy. Let us learn to speak a thousand different languages once again. Let the Tower of Babel fall.”

Neighbourhood fireworks > City provided fireworks

Water damage and damage electrical damage to the house were housesitting thanks to frozen water pipes over Christmas means we’re bringing in New Year’s Eve with CNN via MacBook. Hilariously the internet just died.

Vale 2022

Being in Tennessee for New Year’s Eve this year has really revealed to me How annoying it must be to be an American with Australian friends. You wake up here to blurry fireworks photos from Oz then everyone goes to bed and it’s still half a day until NYE here.

Reflecting back over 2022 the one thing I can say for sure is that it’s been 21 years and I still haven’t forgotten about Dre

As lovely as it is, TikTok is candy from Chinese spies and really ought to be banned purely on national security reasons. More at daringfireball.net by John @Gruber.

Another day, another Airbnb, another part of Tennessee, another sunset. Seems cyclical.

Ted Gioia documents the story of Barnes and Noble’s rebirth and regrowth:

“Daunt refused to play this game. He wanted to put the best books in the window. He wanted to display the most exciting books by the front door. Even more amazing, he let the people working in the stores make these decisions. This is James Daunt’s super power: He loves books.”

Boring kids

A Squirrel’s tale

So a white Christmas in Nashville is pretty cool

Old mate out on the back fence of our Airbnb in Nashville this morning is a bit cold.

Merry Christmas from The Withers, Tennessee edition.

Please let it be true, that 2023 is the year of RSS. Death to big tech running our conversations, our views, our beliefs, our relationships and our careers.

That cold front hits Franklin, Tennessee and its -18 degrees Celsius but feels like negative 30.

So so cold

Where you from? Australians: Australia. Americans: Town, State, GPS Coordinates, local landmarks, name of their neighbour.

I’ve been in Nashville less than 24 hours and the Christmas miracles have already begun

It is well

and with that the 2022 wedding season comes to an end

Waiting in an airport lounge for a flight to Dallas after wrapping up all my wedding bookings in Australia I thought I’d answer a few questions.

Matt asked for Tequila ratings. Mike asked Why Mexico? Kristie asked why people fly their celebrant around the world for weddings, why not get someone local? Dan asked What’s the best low-key wedding I’ve done. Steele demanded an answer. Chantell asked how often I meet with my couples to do personalised ceremonies I can do without a script. Luke asked about any time saving tips in business. Mel asked if I was quitting weddings now?

I’ve almost escaped Australia, just waiting for that delay to Dallas to stop being a delay

Pretty proud to see our AirBnb - The Tugun Pause - featured as a best Gold Coast AirBnb beach house and also best Gold Coast pet-friendly accomodation!

Have you ever wondered what the last tweet will be?

Update on my Playdate pre-order/order that I’ve been salivating over since 2019: they were kind enough to move me to American shopping and it’s now in the mail!

You’re Being Lied to About Electric Cars writes Jonny Lieberman:

“Science has repeatedly shown EVs are better for humans, despite the meme you just retweeted.”

What a dramatic moment: Just dropped in to get a haircut from my favourite barber before I fly back to North America on Tuesday and he’s quitting his job as I walk in! Awkwardly shakes my hand then gets his stuff and leaves!

Really proud of how The Sizzle has grown. You deserve all the success, Anthony/@decryption.

“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), ‘Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?’ chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”

I’m selling a 245L Hisense freezer if anyone is interested, like this totally genuine buyer.

24 hours in the town I grew up in.

My first ISP: still going My first job at the cinema: cinema closed down Fav restaurant: still going First nightclub: closed down Eimeo Pub: still going Sun shining on: Mackay Sun not shining on: Sarina Bridge I sat in traffic on whilst there was a bikie gang shootout: still going. School wear I became reel smart: still going. RIP: Mackay’s only space station

Growing up in Central Queensland meant your coastline was always filled with ships taking coal and sugar to the world.

I really weirdly always feel alone when I look at a coastline and see no ships.

So it’s been nice to be back in Mackay for a few hours.

Before we get too excited about fusion energy, space travel and flying cars, it’s important to remember that this is how Australia Post wants me to find a lost package, with details from a Windows 2000 screenshot and calling a national hotline.

My favourite thing about flying out of regional locations in Australia is that you can be having coffee with a mate just before the flight, watch the flight coming to land which, means you should probably get up and drive to the airport so you can walk on just-in-time.

iOS 16.2 means we can listen to music without the lyrics for focused work

Chatted to a flight attendant today who is proudly quitting and taking a job with Virgin after Christmas because of all the “negativity at Jetstar” which is hard to believe because Jetstar seems like it would be the loveliest place to work if you hate existing.

Such a Century Gothic welcome

Is flying with your pillow a thing? Half the passengers disembarking and about the same boarding my flight have pillows. It’s an 11am 90 minute flight!

How is Jetstar the only Australian airline fully utilising the Apple Wallet API with flight and gate updates and heaps of info inside the ticket info page?

Nine years ago I had an internet-enabled egg tray. I feel like technology has not really advanced past this milestone.

It’s absolutely glorious reading the reactions to the introduction of the push button.

“The fact that so often in modern America one may press a button and be served, seems to relieve one of any necessity for responsibility about what goes on behind the button?”

Oxford University was over 300 years old when the Aztec Empire was founded - more unlikely simultaneous events over at Kottke.

The invention of jaywalking by Clive Thompson.

“You have to think anyway, so why not think big?”

back in my safe place: “going somewhere”

Hey, you guys wanna play old people’s Seven Minutes in Heaven?

Novelist Jeanette Winterson on the value of darkness:

“I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing — their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses.

To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights — then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought.”

AI loves a good beach deer: “brown deer on white sand beach during daytime photo”

Imma start sending this to everyone I ever meet so they know how to rate me when the social credit system from Black Mirror finally comes into play.

Brian Eno:

“One of the reasons I have to take distinct breaks when I work is to allow the momentum of a particular direction to run down, so that another one can establish itself.”

Ted Gioia:

“Mr. Zuckerberg’s ideal Metaverse is just a panopticon—those infamous prisons where every inmate can be scrutinized simultaneously.”

Chris Dixon:

“What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in 10 years.”

Well, that will be the last time I ever take hot or not advice from Balenciaga.

The couple I married today at Freycinet’s Honeymoon Bay married in secret (after booking me four years and a pandemic ago) so I tried my hand at double-exposures and blurry photos.

Annie-B Parson:

“Social media forms are performative solo forms with an odd conflation of friendship and marketing; the body is alone in a room performing the self, with an undercurrent of desire for applause. Without a town square to gather in and hash out the day with neighbors, social media communications have a shading of loneliness underneath.”

Today milestones:

11yrs ago Rhi and Jarryd became official. 10yrs ago Rhi found me on Instagram. 9 yrs ago I quit 4BC, went full time as a celebrant, and got on Nine’s Today Show as the “celebrant that only does cool weddings” 🤮 Today I married Jarryd & Rhi at sunrise in the Byron Bay rainstorm before flying to Hobart.

Today is day 10 away from my family. I embarked on this trip to Australia thinking I’d get lots of sleep and rest from being a dad. Instead of barely slept and miss them like crazy. Please don’t tell them, they already hold too much power over me.

1. Mastodon’s celebration of the open web, the indie web, is an evergreen celebration that enough people, me included, will always get onboard with.

2. Mastodon is everything we’re looking for in Twitter except it’s not Twitter.

3. No one single ego can rule the Mastodon, fediverse, indieweb, open web. Instead many many egos can, will, and do.

4. Mastodon isn’t a complete social media product, still requiring many features to even gain parity with what the average internet user considers the bare minimum for a social networking product. Today I couldn’t upload a video because it was too good of a quality.

5. The business model of Mastodon/the Fediverse is missing links that only generosity can complete. Which is nice amongst friends. But all of us generous admins, hosts, mods have our limits (or jobs, kids, relationships). That’s the strength begging Micro.Blog, $5 a month and you’re good.

6. It’s actually a lot of work and resource to run a Mastodon instance still. Digital Ocean’s $200 free spend will run out soon.

Travel hack for New Zealand is to fly out of Queenstown Airport because they have a special check in counter for frequent flyers.

If you’re thinkin' of being my burger it don’t matter if you’re black or white

Glacier to Ground pop-up waterfall

The Mātukituki River valley

ZQN bound

How am I supposed to drive five hours on an Ice Break

I’m sitting in row three - the last row - of business class on this flight from Canberra to Brisbane after being upgraded overnight and the Queensland Premier just walked past me to economy.

How did the Qantas algorithm put me ahead of Palaszczuk?!

Couple I’m marrying tomorrow: We’d like to have an entertaining and funny wedding ceremony. Me: Oooh, I’m going to have to Google how to do that. Them: Awkward silence.

🎶 It must be hard for musicians and songwriters to try and produce better songs than the best song ever produced, Frenzal Rhomb’s Mr. Charisma.

The internet is more fun when you upload as much as you download. When you stop, comment, post, share instead of doom scroll. People create and also consume, not just consume consume consumer consume.

Re: Bird app

Cute. On the news that the leap second is being removed, Rev. Pavel Gabor, an astrophysicist and the vice director of the Vatican Observatory Research Group in Tucson, Arizona said that,

“atomic timekeeping was just one example of how the world was becoming incomprehensible to the average person, and that scientists had a responsibility to help people feel in control of their lives.”

And he went on to say,

“I think sensitivity to this mistrust of elites, mistrust of experts, mistrust of science and institutions, that’s something that’s a very real problem in today’s world,” he said. “And let’s not contribute to it.”

I’m so looking forward to the world returning to normalcy and peace in 2035 when the leap second is removed.

Breaking: news.

You take a six week break in Mexico and your phone gets real judgemental

Philip Glass:

”I don’t know what I’m doing. And if you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new. As long as you know what you’re doing, nothing much of interest is going to happen.”

It’s not often you get Coolangatta and Surfers Paradise in the same photo. But that’s what happens when I’m back in Australia :)

Current status: Getting wasted on old fashioneds in the Los Angeles Qantas First Class Lounge.

I don’t think Trump will even make it to the Republican Nomination for President, let alone the actual Presidency. The Trump voter hates losers more than lefties and abortions.

I’ve been talking about switching social networks for a decade now …

Having my first experience of Live Activities on the latest iOS software. The app that is “live” is Flighty, and I really like this. The only negative is that 4G/3G/wifi is terrible here.

To chool for school

Experiencing the weirdest vibe right now. I’m packing to leave home for a month, and the place I’m travelling to is Australia. I never thought Australia would be somewhere I travel to, only from.

Dane Winer:

“Twitter inherited the blogosphere, in a sense, and the chaos of the company hid the fact that it was owned, all that we put into it, we owned none of it. It could all be sold.”

Sharing God’s Law from Letters of Note, as seen multiple times around the internet and on The West Wing, now in it’s original form, by Kent Ashcraft:

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s law. I have learned a great deal from you, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend homosexuality, for example, I will simply remind him or her that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other laws in Leviticus and Exodus and how to best follow them.

When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord (Leviticus 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. How should I deal with this?

I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as stated in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Leviticus 15:19-24). The problem is, how can I tell?

I have tried asking, but most women take offense. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may buy slaves from the nations that are around us. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify?

I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

A friend of mine says that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Leviticus 10:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don’t agree. Can you settle this?

Leviticus 20:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God’s Word is eternal and unchanging.

Your devoted disciple and adoring fan.

Are you a parent of a toddler or an assistant to a male CEO of a tech startup?

Why Mastodon is “big” in Japan

I think about this email that Steve Jobs wrote to himself a lot

Gosh I needed to enjoy this: “You Can’t Handle The Truth,” but it’s the Toy Story Song

Touché Google Translate

Watching Seinfeld and the episode ‘The Limo’ starts. Opening scene is at a NY airport and a Trump airline Boeing 727.

Of course the only Trump cameo in an episode of Seinfeld is one from 1992, about the neo nazi.

Rancho Pescadero, the new old kid on the block, just re-opened. Keen as mustard to start making weddings there!

❤️ El Pescadero, Baja California Sur

Maeve Brennan in a letter to Tillie Olsen via Letters of Note:

“I have been trying to think of the word to say to you that would never fail to lift you up when you are too tired or too sad not [to] be downcast. But I can think only of a reminder—you are all it has. You are all your work has. It has nobody else and never had anybody else. If you deny it hands and a voice, it will continue as it is, alive, but speechless and without hands. You know it has eyes and can see you, and you know how hopefully it watches you. But I am speaking of a soul that is timid but that longs to be known. When you are so sad that you ‘cannot work’ there is always a danger fear will enter in and begin withering around. A good way to remain on guard is to go to the window and watch the birds for an hour or two or three. It is very comforting to see their beaks opening and shutting.”

Britt & I toured around this new resort, Rancho Pescadero, last week to talk about making weddings there. Those oceanview rooms are actually built into dunes & the cactus were geotagged then replanted back into the same exact locations. Only $3k a night on the beach there!

This is Noah Sushi in Pescadero. The best sushi I have ever tasted, and I’ve had good sushi, even in Japan. It’s on a dirt road, with no signage, and no fancy tables inside. People come from hundreds of kilometres around to enjoy it.

Baja is wild.

Street names in Baja are wild, in that they barely exist. To prove my residence/address I need to show an electrical bill. So this street a few blocks from our house is hilariously named.

It’s named after a gardener who still lives in that street, and drinks multiple litres of alcohol a day. His nick name is “Litre” or in Spanish “Litro”. So a gringo who loves him had a street sign made, attached to the pole at the start of the street, now everyone calls it Litro Street.

In the future we won’t share our most intimate stories with, and through, the world’s biggest tech companies. Mastodon and blogs might not be the complete indieweb story, but it’s at least in the first or second chapter.

I’ll never forget today. The day that my 20 month old daughter, whilst holding a banana, screamed for another banana, but when she had two, realised she only wanted one.

The classic B1 and B2 dilemma.

Social networks have three assets: a network effect (so we can connect with people), content moderation (so we can actually enjoy using it), content (so we have something to enjoy/consume).

The content creators have always been at the bottom of the stack. Underpaid and under-appreciated," by the social network owners.

So what if we made a Twitter owned by us?

There’s a turning tide against Twitter and Meta towards Mastodon, and honestly Mastodon is pretty good. It’s decentralised in that you can sign up to any Mastodon server/instance and talk to other people on other instances, that’s called federation. It’s one of the tentpole features of Mastodon. Federation, or the fediverse, means you can sign up to, for example, the @mastodon.social instance and if I’m in @aus.social, we can talk to each other.

But if we’re both on the same instance there’s some nice ways of discovering other people and other content, in particular discovering people and content on the same server.

Plus the instance you choose to be on has a brand story. If you’re communicating how to find and follow you on Mastodon there’s a branding aspect. Imagine saying on a podcast “follow me at Josh at Mastodon dot social” as opposed to “follow me at Josh at cool name dot com.” It can’t be long until corporations and large brands take the opportunity to start their own instance.

So what if content creators got in early and had our own network?

That’s my proposal, to start a Mastodon instance owned and run by content creators. Podcasters, writers, newsletter writers, vloggers, video makers, photographers, personalities, broadcasters - creators. Because we’d own the network we’d reap the benefits, instead of sending them to VCs, corporations, or Elon Musk/Zuckerberg.

Because all the creators have existing networks - and products - we’d flex our influence to bring audiences to the new network. Also, in case it’s not obvious, nothing will be taken away from your existing work. What changes is that instead of providing Twitter and Meta with free content that upholds the network effect that feeds their shareholders/stakeholders, you’re providing free content to build and uphold your own network that operates like a co-op content farmers market.

I own the domain name ‘theradio.au’ and I reckon it’d be kind of cool to say ‘follow me at Josh at theradio dot au’ in a video or a link o my profile being theradio.au/@josh … or insert your content brand in place of Josh.

I like the generic-ish name, and the idea of “I’m on the radio” as a term of phrase for using the social media platform, particularly as actually being on the FM/AM radio means so little.

I’m open to listening to ideas around how to start, run, and do this well. There are costs to running a Mastdon instance and because the benefits run to creators I’d look to creators to fund the project. With enough people it might be $50-100 a year, and I see the incentives run in the right direction if creators fund and own it. Other business models lend themselves to other incentives and next minute you’re owned by Elon Musk.

Weigh in on the social platform of your choice or email me at josh@withers.co.

Siri, one of the foremost artificial Intelligences, thinks I should call in to the Airbnb to check out. Thanks mate.

Apparently I don’t share my photography enough (sorry, Zac) so it’s mostly on Unsplash.

There you go ya filthy tech-news-lovin animals.

Gosh it irritates me when ‘down south’ writes the national news stories as if no-one from ‘up north’ reads it // @crikey_news @emmaels

My favourite thing about Mastodon actually has nothing to do with Mastodon. It’s the experience of embracing a completely new network with a handful of existing connections but then start following new people creating a whole new social graph whilst screaming “HELLO NEW FRIENDS!”

James Hennessy in The Terminal:

“His primary motivator at this point is the absolutely daunting mathematics of the deal he signed … saddled it with $13 billion in debt and about a billion dollars a year in interest payments alone.”

A few thoughts on Mastodon at the end of day one:

The network brand name is stupid and not sticky, as is “toot”.

Running your own instance is not the best, but it’s not like there’s a perfect instance to join.

Following people is too hard.

It’s a nice system and I like it.

Fish tacos, margaritas, a mariachi band, all on the beach. A perfect night on the Sea of Cortez.

Balandra

I could imagine this hanging on a wall somewhere, I’m really proud of it. On the left there you’ve got what the Mexicans say is there best beach, nationwide.

Playa Balandra (Balandra Beach).

Fifty shades of blue

I decided I was being a grumpy old man by not even trying Mastodon - I think it has a stupid name for a modern product, great for an extinct elephant - but I’ve signed up … @josh@withers.online is me. Who should I follow?

One of us, and I won’t say who, just fell off the bed and landed face first on the tiled floor

On the Sea of Cortez, near La Paz, today

I can handle my parents being disappointed in me, my wife, children and friends. All of your disappointments will come and go.

But man, letting Duolingo down, this cuts deep.

Notes for my gravestone

“This is not a verification status; it’s an Important Blue Internet Checkmark, which in 2022 is just as legit. Also the Important Blue Internet Checkmark may turn into a bunch of crabs at any time 🦀”

Finally, the BeReal competitor I’ve been waiting for: TweetReal.

Day 30 in Mexico: Still haven’t joined a drug cartel. Fish tacos are amazing. Send coffee.

Trung Phan on the “massive” podcast opportunity he’s identified, and something I’ve thought about a lot:

“Whatever your niche, a single person on a mic in their home can create the definitive long-form audio content for whatever is their “most valuable audience”. It’s a very simple idea …but not easy.”

So apparently the Commonwealth marriage celebrants portal and database was hacked … just a program run by the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s department …

Why don’t we use the word “swashbuckling” more? It’s a very cool word.

The MacOS dictionary defines swashbuckling as an adjective as “engaging in daring and romantic adventures with bravado or flamboyance” and as a noun “daring and romantic adventure.”

It came to mind as I read Margaret Sullivan’s book, Newsroom Confidential, and she recalled the story of Jeff Bezos addressing the Washington Post staff:

“Even in the world of journalism, I think the Post is just a little more swashbuckling. There’s a little more swagger. There’s a tiny bit of bad-assness here at the Post.” After some applause and laughs from the exuberant crowd, Bezos elaborated on those words with some context: “Without quality journalism, swashbuckling would just be dumb. Swashbuckling without professionalism leads to those epic-fail YouTube videos. It’s the quality journalism at the heart of everything. And then when you add that swagger and that swashbuckling, that’s making this place very, very special.”

My new life goal is to be described as swashbuckling.

It’s weird to see so much talk about Mastodon and people walk right past micro.blog. I’ve been a user since @manton launched it on Kickstarter, and I think I heard about it on @gruber’s Talk Show - I love it.

Missed the eclipse, but caught sunrise this morning

We’re heading back to Hawaii in mid-January and it got me thinking about the last time I was there and I created a marriage ceremony across the bay from Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler house.

I’ll never know if Steve witnessed me in my element on Maui, but they’ve never officially said what I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing was about …

Anyway, this is just your regular reminder that I make epic marriage ceremonies from Ipswich to Iceland and everywhere between.

Over seven years since Workflow first graced the Apple ecosystem - since then being acquired by Apple and renamed Shortcuts which makes it so easy to Google for information about - it’s still a little-known tool on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

My favourite shortcut - it’s the ultimate shortcut - created by the ultimate Shortcuts guy, Federico Viticci at Macstories, is Apple Frames. The shortcut has just been updated to its third version and is ever more powerful and works even better.

You feed the shortcut one or more screenshots you’ve taken on the device, and it inserts the screenshot into an Apple device frame, so the resultant image carries more context. Examples beneath of some quick single screenshots, and three iPhone screenshots shared together in one image.

Get the shortcut here.

I am continually fascinated whilst reading Letters of Note as to how people not of this time, people who lived 50, 100, or 200 years ago talk about the hardships and tribulations of modern life - in their own context - being hard and negative.

Martha Gellhorn in a letter to Raleigh Trevelyan on boxing day 1967 wrote “Do you think it’s at all sensible to wish anyone a Happy New Year? I think the best one can do nowadays is just to wish that we all survive, year by year.”

Or as the preacher spoke to their church a few hundred years before Christ, recorded in the book of Ecclesiastes, “Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” and they continued, “I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”

All of humanity, forevermore, just trying to survive, year by year.

Martha Gellhorn in a letter to Victoria Glendinning on 30th September 1987:

“Anyway, I intend to spend the rest of my life wasting time.”

There are two kinds of people in the world, people who confidently pronounce “pho” and the people who anxiously listen to those people say it because they’re sure they’re not saying it right.

I can’t believe that so much valuable conversation is {you should give me all your money} interspersed with ads and unrelated content {gamble your money away!} these days as if it’s a natural way to read and write {you’re so stupid and fat} lol.

Apple executives discussing iMessage for Android is beautifully shortsighted.

We put these people on pedestals but they’re just lucky enough to be considered winners.

Idea: The most important part of Twitter is the feeling of sending the tweet.

No-one sees your tweets anyway, so what if we made a new Twitter where all your followers and replies were just GPT-3 nodes.

An AI social network where computers affirm you and your thoughts.

I’m wondering whether “stay in your medium lane” is good advice for Elon Musk and Twitter today?

I think about Instagram starting as a still photo medium and how I like it less as it has changed lanes. Facebook started as a “friend-to-friend connection” medium, and I like it less as Adam Mosseri has obsessed over Reels and videos.

Twitter started as, and mostly still is, a text medium.

The human brain likes to catalogue and silo things. Twitter is a textual medium, and all of us on it love that about it.

If Twitter wants to evolve to take on YouTube and Facebook and leave text behind, that will be its death knell. Not headwinds in the marketplace, but the fact that those of us that like to read and write text, want to connect and share in a place that champions reading and writing text.

That’s why Imoved my writing and sharing to Micro.blog when it launched. Micro.blog champions text and text sharing, whilst also encouraging you to own your content/text.

If anything was going to take Twitter’s place today, in my humble opinion, it would be Micro.blog, because it has a business plan, it has a network, by design it’s healthy and good for the soul, but it champions the reading and writing of text.

Sunday sunrise from Cabo

“Chinese restaurant”

Evan Amrmstrong at Every on How Elon Wins:

“Twitter is a perfect case study of the shifting power dynamics of the ad market and how to make money in this era of the internet.”

Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry. Them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye.

I met Charles Wooley when I was in line to be his producer on what’s now called the Triple M regional radio network.

Smart guy, good interviewer, wasn’t going to leave Tasmania for a big radio job, so they built out the Hobart studios to accomodate him.

I never took the gig, but I was impressed that someone could love where they live so much to the chagrin of a radio job.

In the Sunday Tasmanian today:

“But here I am, after a lifetime travelling the world and interviewing prime ministers, presidents and dictators, now about to engage as deputy mayor of Sorell in what is so often considered the lowly third tier of Tasmanian government.”

I’ve been uploading to Unsplash for almost five years, and people always ask why I would submit my work to a website that gives it away mostly for free?

I consider Unsplash my photography mentor and university. Because ultimately, I believe, that good work resonates with people. Firstly it has to resonate with you, but secondly with someone else. It doesn’t have to be the most popular work in the history of work, but a successful artwork resonates with at least as many people as that created it, in my humble opinion.

I started uploading in early 2018.

So back to Unsplash, I’ve shared 505 photos that have been viewed over 152 million times, and downloaded and used over 800 thousand times, making me one of the “1000 most seen contributors ever” which is lovely.

A problem though is my recent work. Work that is arguably better, shot on better cameras, with better lenses, and better colour grading … because I’ve learned and gotten better with better gear.

Of my most viewed photos “of all time” only two photos from the last year are in my top 70 images. After 70 they start appearing a little, but inside the top 70, number 69 is a boring drone shot, and number 8 was an outlier. Luna had woken up early so the two of us wanted to go watch the sun rise, and we both took our cameras.

Obviously the longer a work has been available, the more views and downloads it can get. Secondly, as Unsplash is online longer, I’m assuming more photographers are uploading more work, so the pool gets larger, and the available views and downloads may lessen.

When or why would I leave Unsplash?

I used to think I’d leave Unsplash when I reached 1 million downloads. But I think the truer statement is that I’d stop giving my work away for free, when it resonated with enough people who wanted to pay for it.

How do I reach that number? How do I find those people? I have no idea. The only thing I know to do today is step one, to create, step two and three and four can’t even happen without step one.

Money is nice, but making work that resonates with people, work that makes you and I feel something. That’s like a little bit nicer.

I’ll leave you with my most popular piece, a photo from a backroad before sunrise in Queenstown, New Zealand, shot on my old original DJI Mavic Pro, with just enough light for it to be a sharp and in focus image.

In the Gold Coast Bulletin today @AnnWasonMoore nails it making the biggest losses/mistakes the Gold Coast has experienced. But I’ll add one more: the Indy 300. It was so much more interesting than Supercars, and Aussie driver Will Powers still dominates!

Put a bag of cookies in the break room and it might sit for days.

Open the bag and leave it out, and within an hour, all the cookies will be gone.

We are happy to take a tiny slice off the thing that’s being shared, but we hesitate to open the bag.

The same is true with all of the initiatives in our culture. Design, movements and ideas are all trapped, waiting to be opened, and then the rest of us will happily pile on.

Open the bag.

By an unknown author, from the Startupy newsletter

I think a lot about the guy whose car I ran into on the first day of owning a car in Mexico. I didnt put the car in park or put the handbrake on, classic idiotic move on the first day of driving on the wrong side of the road in a new car.

Scratched his back bumper, lots of talking, making phone calls to family, googling costs to fix, he comes back ready to finish me financially, and asks for $500 pesos. $39.60 AUD.

“Good day” in Spanish is “Buenos días”, phonetically (in Josh Spanish) “beh-wan-ass dee-ass” and I now understand how Australian English must be hard for people learning English because Baja Mexicans basically say an abbreviated “bun dee”, which I guess is “G’Day”.

A Thursday afternoon at Playa Los Cerritos

Just a boy and his favourite seventy to two-hundred millimetres of glass photographed by another boy and his medium format film camera, Jack Fitz at Playa Los Cerritos at sunset.

John Ruskin in a letter to C. E. Norton, 4th Nov 1860:

“I find Penguins at present the only comfort in life. One feels everything in the world so sympathetically ridiculous, one can’t be angry when one looks at a Penguin.”

Thinking about Berlin’s computer Game Museum, the Computerspielemuseum, today.

It’s the only building in Berlin I can walk into and feel nostalgic and childlike.

TomTom: I came here to sell satnavs and kick ass, and I’m all outta satnavs.

Business idea: a coffee translator.

All I want in Mexico is to just order my coffee.

In Australia I order a long black with cream (pouring cream), or if they don’t have cream, with cold milk. I call it a poor man’s latte. All of the coffee, less milk.

A big cup of black coffee, and I take the temperature and black-coffee-ness out of it with a dash of dairy.

In Baja an Americano is basically a long black, but often filter coffee which would be fine if it was lukewarm. An espresso is an espresso shot. A long black doesn’t exist. I got close today, but once I asked for “like an Americano but hot”, they also brought out hot milk, and you don’t want hot milk in this drink.

My fortune for help on how to order a “long black with cream/milk” in Spanish, or in a way that local baristas will understand.

I’m reflecting on the recent Optus hack today as I wonder what to do with my phone number I’ve had for 20 odd years.

So much of modern society needs a phone number to work and to identify us.

New services register with a phone number and text message verification code, trusting that only you would have your phone number or SIM card.

When I turn off my Australian SIM card in Mexico iMessage warns me the clock has started.

It’s kind of ridiculous that something as fragile as a phone number is the backbone of identity.

I think do Dave Winer’s ten year old blog post proposing DNS as a form of ID, but I feel like that would exclude so many normies.

Funnily enough, in many parts of Mexico the police will take your number plate or drivers license back to the police station as that’s the closest the national identity systems don’t really exist here.

How are we supposed to verify who we are? Maybe a blue tick will help?

Reason no. 72 to read James Hennessy’s email:

“I decided to dig into this, because the prospect of an intersection of forgotten Australian pulp lit and Cold War tech development is, regrettably, extremely my shit”

@jrhennessy

Just going on the record before November 2022 hits to say that I had a blue tick before it wasn’t cool.

That’s right, mum. I was verified before @tealou.

Nieman Labs reckons that newspaper political endorsements might not matter anymore. I think that’s for the better?

Gary Voth’s piece, The Forgotten Lens, reminds me why I love the 50mm so much. I only have a vintage Minolta f/2 manual focus lens at the moment but now I want the Canon RF 50mm f/1.2!

Is this mural on the toilet entry wall about menstruation?

Dave Winer with the best Twitter analogy:

“Why would I leave Twitter? It’s like living in NY and not taking the subway. Sure it’s dirty and smells bad, but it’s how you get places.”

The latest in dynamic bus signage technology

Reporting for The Verge, Justine Calma says that

“Traffic jams are tied to lower birth weights.”

It’s almost like us humans are making ourselves extinct eventually.

Someone just got a fire truck for their birthday or the truck celebrated its birthday. Either way, congrats!

Tequila shot $1USD

This New Yorker profile of Director, James Cameron, hit home with this line:

“He sees himself as essentially outside and other and alone; he bites the hand that feeds.”

Thats a solid mark of an artist, that they create from the outside-ness, the loneliness, and in doing so they bit the hand that feeds.

Just yesterday a photographer friend and I were lamenting this feeling in ourselves. It’s why I found it so easy to transplant to a new country, maybe why I feel so at home with an airline ticket.

So if you feel alone, you’re not alone, despite the fact you truly are.

Thursday’s sunset

Britt and I are watching Netflix’s new show The Mole at the moment and as that guy who knows Queensland like the back of his hand I’ve been following the filming locations keenly. (If you know what that Daintree resort is, please tell me!)

So as the team reached “The Great Barrier Reef” aka The Whitsundays I immediately recognised the location as Woodward Bay, just a few minutes' drive north of Airlie Beach. Visitors in the past include the King of Morocco, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but most importantly for this story, the owner’s husband, Jodie Rich. Apparently, they all helicoptered in, but I just drove when I visited.

I’ve been brought in - pretty sure it’s 1999 or 2000 - to install two Alcatel PABX telephone systems, one that sits at the front gate, and another in the main compound, connected by fibre optic, to allow the main compound to make and receive phone calls, but also for the fancy new gate to be opened by phone call.

I worked for a local company called Business Solutions, and my experience there has always stuck with me. We were a one-stop shop where we provided actual business solutions, not just products. I still love doing that in businesses today.

Anyhow, I’m on this amazing property that Tom Cruise has just stayed at, and Japanese property developer, Kumagai Gumi, has just dropped $150 million on the property, then sold it to Jodee Rich’s wife for $2.5 million so that’s probably a totally cool and normal transaction.

The whole thing was out of reach of ASIC as One Tel went broke because the husband didn’t own the property that was attributed to him, but his wife did. That’s the kind of business sense that gets you places, like starting your own top-level domain (.CEO) and NFT.NYC, kill me now, this bloke has such an epic legacy of grifting.

Seeing the property in The Mole was cool, it looked so similar twenty years on. It is honestly a really beautiful property. Back then they allegedly had lasers across the bay to keep people out, and as a young bloke, it’s the nicest property I’ve ever stepped foot on. I remember being told that the coffee table was made from a door of a monastery.

Interested in staying the night? It’s only five figures a night.

And if you need a PABX installed in a weird situation twenty years ago, give me a call.

Good business sense tells me it’s time to sell all my beef, children, petrol, and non-essential oils, and buy more computers. Thanks for the revealing graphs, Nick Evershed at The Guardian

The moonrise over the Pacific Ocean was pretty cool tonight

It’s funny how the human brain likes little milestones and we call it “feeling real” … like just now how I put the finishing touches on a Wedding Officiant in Mexico page on my website, and enabled the Squarespace translation webpage feature.

On ya bus

Bob Dylan:

“Boy, I hurried… I hurried for a long time. I’m sorry I did. All the time you’re hurrying, you’re not really as aware as you should be. You’re trying to make things happen instead of just letting it happen. You follow me?”

Tuesday’s sunset from Todos Santos

Punta Gasparino, Baja California Sur

Finally, it happened

I’m a sucker for 360 spherical images, but the places you can view them not-flattened are few. Lightroom online is one, so here’s the link for this one of El Pescadero at sunrise this morning: adobe.ly/3f55Fp3

El Pescadero, the little fishing village we’re calling home this month

Deporte bus

El Pescadero // home

Felt cute, might delete later

Hey, if you ever can’t get a hold of Jesus, lemme know, I’ll send you some Mexican Salvo, a sin remover.

Did Bono actually encourage Tim Cook on services and subscriptions when they worked out the deal to give away Songs of Innocence through iTunes?

Tim Cook in 2014:

“But we’re not a subscription organisation.”

Tim Cook in 2022 (paraphrased):

“Services, services, services, services, services, services, services, services, services, services, services, services, services.

Bono in The Guardian on the birth of U2, that iTunes album and Live Aid:

“I don’t think I voted for the name U2, but I didn’t stop it. I definitely stopped the second suggestion – the Flying Tigers”

I’ve eaten sushi in Japan, Iceland, New York & Vancouver. Australians have made me sushi, Italians, Croatians & Kiwis.

But I never thought the best sushi I’d ever eat was down a dirt road outside of a small village of 3,000 people called Pescadero.

Noah’s was 🤌🏼

I’ve never heard of Haiku photography but I like it.

Breaking news: Luna rode a horsey and she is pretty flippin pumped about the whole idea.

The directions to the Los Sagrados horse rescue we visited today said to go through the Cardone Forest. I was curious what a forest in the desert looks like.

Welcome to the Cardone Forest outside of Pescadero.

A helpful guide to our journey so far.

We like Baja California Sur so much I’m worried we might not see the rest of the country.

Thursday in Todos Santos

Sell everything and start again somewhere else, it’s awesome!

When I first started as a computer tech back in 1998 there was a really complex procedure we’d undertake if a computer just wasn’t working properly. We’d reformat it, wipe everything clean, and reinstall Windows.

I feel like that’s what’s happening to us. A good old fashioned life-defrag, a reinstall of our operating system, getting us back into working order.

2022, the year where Lettuce made the news twice.

My li’l mate, Luna, turns four today. She wants you all to know that she’s a big girl now.

Ted Gioia asks if smart people do books anymore?

“Goodby logos, hello brand logos.”

Sammy J on ABC Melbourne:

‘Acts like a Bureau but always the BOM to me.’

I can’t help but feel that Mark Zuckerberg is a bit off Apple at the moment.

As someone who uses WhatsApp because he’s forced to, not because he wants to, it’s an ugly app and I only get more message spam from Telegram. Every day there’s a new spam-women in my Whatsapp.

We’re in Mexico at the moment and I have thoughts on spending Australian money abroad. Four years ago today I became an Up Bank customer, and it’s one of the best things I’ve done.

The original sell was that if you had an Up debit Mastercard you could turn up at an international ATM or EFTPOS machine and swipe away without getting dodgy international fees. The payment would be made at the current rate, nothing dodgy or stupid. They lived up to that promise, and they still do today. Britt and I have moved all of our personal banking to Up and love everything about the bank, the app, the debit Mastercards, everything.

If you’re travelling overseas soon I could not recommend Up more. I started as an Up customer for international travel only, and after using the app more and more we became full-time customers.

The only thing Up couldn’t do inside itself was to purchase an international currency and spend that currency overseas. You might want to do this if you are travelling somewhere for a longer period of time than the week or two a holiday might be, like us moving to Mexico. (Side note: Up does have a current partnership with Wise, and I understand it’s just an easier way to transfer money to Wise.)

It looked like the Australian dollar would be going down on the Mexican peso over the next few months so I wanted to hedge against this and purchase some pesos. I have already used Wise (formerly Transferwise) for many international payments for our business, but hadn’t used the issued debit cards or used the international currency bank account feature yet.

Qantas had also launched a “business-grade” version of its Qantas Travel Money product called Qantas Business Money and they had big Qantas points offer available recently, so I took the opportunity to use both products. I moved a considerable amount of Australian Dollars to Qantas Business Money to help us purchase a car here, and then moved a similar amount to Wise for spending money. Qantas Business Money is a Qantas service provided by Airwallex, a Melbourne company with a handful of offices worldwide.

A few points on the three different travel money products.

• Up has been seamless and worked (AUD->MXN) all the time at point of sale and ATM.
• My Australian-issued American Express has not worked (AUD->MXN) at point of sometimes.
• The Wise card has worked (MXN->MXN) at point of sale all but once, and I’m betting that was something at the gas station, as the card worked inside the gas station but not at the attendant’s EFTPOS machine on the forecourt.
• I transferred Mexican pesos from Wise to a Mexican bank account on a Sunday evening Mexico time and by the time I’d woken up I had received confirmation it had worked and the recipient had received the funds.
• I transferred Mexican pesos from Qantas Business Money to buy a car on Friday morning at 11am Los Cabos time and it’s just gone 1pm Monday morning and the money still hasn’t arrived to the recipient’s account.
• AirWallex support is operational 9-5 Monday to Friday Melbourne time. Even inside that time the phone number isn’t answered, and neither is the San Francisco office’s phone number answered. At this stage I am assuming the Airwallex and Qantas Business Money support team is a concrete block in the corner of the office.
• After doing business in a different country for a week I could not recommend against Qantas and Airwallex more. Do not use them if you want transfers to happen swiftly and wish to have support when things go wrong. I’ve had previous issues with the Qantas Travel Money built into the Qantas Frequent Flyer card, I don’t think anyone at Qantas has actually ever used these products abroad, so neither should you.
• After three days silence a Qantas Business Money staff member told me that they needed to check for fraud and safety which would be fine if this was communicated, but also they promised the transaction would take place as banks opened today and it has not.

Which banking products should you use?

• If you are happy with making withdrawals and payments at the going rate at the time, I recommend using Up.
• If you want to buy foreign currency and spend it abroad, use Wise.
• I’ve also had success swiping my ANZ Frequent Flyer Blank Visa card but I have only carried that as a backup.
• I haven’t tested all the Australian bank credit cards, I understand many of them are fine.

Finally, you’re welcome to Google the products and do your own research, you really should, but if you sign up for Up using this link you get $5. If you sign up for Wise using this link you get a fee-free transfer of up to 500GBP and they pay me $90 for every three of you that signs up and transfers $300.

Some inherent problems in the internet of 2022, in my humble opinion:

1. Everyone is too exposed to everyone else, for example, it’s wild that anyone and everyone can read these words I’m typing. It’s beautiful and wild, but ultimately we aren’t born ready to be so exposed. There’s the smallest number of celebrities that have successfully been in the public spotlight for their whole lives and come out unharmed, and even those that keep a positive public identity have conspiracy theories made up about them (Hi, Tom Hanks). I don’t think we were made to be in community with the whole planet.
2. Many people want to be more highly exposed, and believe that they are not exposed enough, and think everyone else needs to be exposed to them, their thoughts, their art, their work. We don’t. I’m actually ok with not knowing what Kanye West thinks at the moment.
3. What happens if the extremists don’t live in the light but decamp off to the shadows? Do they become a problem for society? Do they impose on your and my own safety?

The most embarrassing thing about Kanye West buying Parler isn’t that he bought Parler, but that he (and most people) think that the world needs a new social media platform.

It’s the internet equivalent of starting or building more and more new gated communities in a town to make it safer and better.

Ultimately the town without gated communities, but the ability to operate without the walls and gates is the better town.

What does that mean on a modern worldwide computing platform like the internet? Get a blog. Use your keyboard, type some words, upload some photos, and share them with your mates. Get a blog roll. Share the love and seek out the things you love.

The future of the internet isn’t in the existing, or new, social networks or walled gardens. It’s in freedom of expression and seeking your own inputs.

At least then when Kanye does something stupid, I just get to choose to not read his blog. But if you want to, you can.

Ted Gioia in the Honest Broker:

“This is a signal that we have reached the endgame (of the internet) stage. And a new game is beginning with totally different recipes for success.”

“This could be Heaven or this could be Hell”

• There’s a difference between good tacos and just tacos, good tacos are more likely to be in less-fancy buildings without flashy signage.
• Processing your Mexican temporary residency is much harder than they make it sound.
• Really should have learned more Spanish before getting on the plane.
• Even a nice Hilton hotel is still, in the end, just a hotel.
• It’s amazing how terrible a car can be to still be listed for sale here. I looked at a car for 60,000 pesos (just under $5,000AUD) and I think someone was murdered in it but it wasn’t cleaned.
• Horses, livestock, dogs and other animals all just roam free here. Must be tough for fencers to not be needed.
• Lawns don’t exist here unless you’re in a fancy place. It’d be hard to move here if your identity was built on how good your lawn is.
• Very few Australians are here or have visited here. Many people are surprised to hear we travelled so far.
• Should’ve stopped for a night or two in Los Angeles. 26 hours door to door was a lot for two toddlers.
• Always buy bottled water.
• Oysters taste different here. Bad different.
• I had to drive on the other side of the road for the first time in three years in the presence of a Mexican man whose car I was test driving. He must have spent the whole time wondering why a person who drove this bad wanted to buy a car.
• Money transfers internationally are never as quick as you’d imagine, especially over a weekend.
• There’s little consistency between different offices of Mexican authorities. There’s very much a local spirit in the decisions they make.
• We love it here.
• It’s quite hot.
• Buy a good pram and travel cot, they’re worth their weight in gold.
• Pack light, you don’t need all that stuff.
• There are no Ubers, Didis, Lyfts or taxis in Todos Santos.

We left Los Cabos today for an adventure up to Todos Santos about an hour’s drive north of Cabo San Lucas.

A few observations.

1. The best branding I’ve seen for Mexican food yet is a restaurant called “Five Tacos and a Beer, Please.” You wouldn’t believe what the main item on the menu is.

2. There are a lot of parties in Mexico, and a lot of beer and spirits are sold and consumed. I was the only person at the OXXO (think 7/11) who didn’t buy alcohol while I was there.

3. it hot.

I love Morpho, my new favourite currency (and other numbers) conversion iOS app.

Ahead of travelling to Mexico I wanted to find a new currency conversion app that did two-three things:

1. Had a Lock Screen widget to help me make purchasing decisions quickly and easily considering I still don’t really know how much 1,250 pesos is in personal terms.
2. If they couldn’t do Lock Screen then at least do a widget.
3. Once I opened the app, it gave me a few nuanced currency conversions. I wanted to be able to quickly get my head around AUD, MXN and USD numbers quickly.

Morpho delivered plus they brought in other conversions like weights and temperature.

The widget is great - you can choose which conversion to show, as you can see in the screenshot I wanted to always have a sense of what things on menus were worth so I settled on “what’s 100 pesos worth in Aussie dollars?”

You can then tap the widget to open the app and whatever number you enter at the top is converted below.

Travelling internationally with an iPhone soon? You’ll like this. Even Britt appreciates it and I can never get her on to new apps.

Kurt Vonnegut:

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

It’s happened! We’ve had our first American tourist in Mexico think that Austria and Australia are the same place.

The lovely person “spent some time in Germany one summer” and thought our accents sounded similar.

How can I nominate myself for the Father of the Year Awards? I just bought Luna a Paw Patrol car seat with and without beef.

Sam Kris: The internet is already over.

“In the future—not the distant future, but ten years, five—people will remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or the dirigible. They might still use computer networks to send an email or manage their bank accounts, but those networks will not be where culture or politics happens. The idea of spending all day online will seem as ridiculous as sitting down in front of a nice fire to read the phone book.”

Drove in Mexico for the first time today. I didn’t witness another car on the road in Los Cabos use it’s turn indicator.

I’m worried if I keep using the indicator the local news will do a story on me.

When asked at the restaurant what we were celebrating at dinner tonight I said “being alive!”

Now every staff member congratulates us on every interaction and I’m not sure if they’re being sarcastic or genuine.

The podcast series “Startup” was a thrilling listen as Alex Blumberg created Gimlet. It’s depressing to now read how Spotify has gutted that creation after acquiring it. Maybe Spotify isn’t podcasting’s darling?

I’m using the new Apple Translate app every day in Mexico, it’s pretty cool. Currently having a full conversation with my zero-English Uber driver, Jesus Angel (his name, not a prayer).

My only addition would be the ability to reverse/swap languages easier.

A day in the life of the Withers family: day four (13 October 2022) in Los Cabos, at the Instituto Nacional de Migración (the Mexican National Institute of Immigration), activating our residency visas.

Wednesday sunset

Patron saint of pioneers and travelers, Saint Joseph of the capes.

Or, in Spanish, San Jose del Cabos.

“Fish killer of the week story”

Teaching the Withers girls how to share margaritas

Episode five of Who’s Gonna Save Us with Saul Griffiths, paraphrased by Kai in Dense Discovery:

“A typical Australian suburb spends about $4m on petrol and diesel per year. That creates half a job at the local petrol station which is mostly selling sugar and tobacco anyway – that’s like three things that can kill you in one store! Anyway, if everyone is driving electric vehicles and producing their own electricity, those $4m will stay in the community. We know from spending behaviour that 55% of that money will be spent locally, creating a huge number of jobs. Not just energy jobs, but it’ll be paying for better bakeries, new classrooms, a fresh coat of paint for the sports club, etc. I don’t think we ever really thought about just what a screamingly good thing that would be for every community.“

Turns out that Cabo San Lucas is basically the Bali of the USA.

What a wild ride.

At first Jesus was coming to meet me and take us home.

Then Jesus cancelled on me.

I’m quite conflicted on how I feel about meeting Jesus in the future.

Mexican pests are chill AF

First Mexican sunset // Cabos

Driving from the airport to the hotel in San Jose Cabo and I’ve spotted my first guard in a watch house holding a gun. Despite the girl at immigration saying so, I feel like I’m really in Mexico now.

Mexicans really dislike BlackBerrys

This TSA agent at LAX is giving us a hard time

Adios, Australia

Sitting on a flight that’s migrating our family to Mexico and I’ve never been more terrified and excited in my life. With any luck that energy, and Bluey, will help survive a 13 hour flight with two toddlers. Godspeed, us.

One of these two people just vomited up a whole bloody watermelon on the Qantas lounge carpet

Targeted ad of the year award goes to this lot who just advertised at me, the bloke moving his family to Mexico tomorrow

Self portrait of a tired and weary man who isn’t working for the next six weeks

Will Sansom at UT Health:

“Could eating salmon, cod, tuna, herring or sardines keep our brains healthy and our thinking agile in middle age? New research makes this connection.”

I’ll take some salmon, tuna, and a nap thx.

Freya Stark:

“There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.”

Three days til the Mexican sabbatical.

It was kind of fitting for one of my last weddings before we head to Mexico to be at Weddings at Tiffany’s. One of my first was there as well, and it’s one of my most memorable weddings because of how the groom thanked and encouraged me after the ceremony.

He said “I thought you were going to be a really shit celebrant, but you were awesome!”

Over the last 14 years I hope I’ve equally positively surprised you with my “me-ness” whilst also been a solid rock you can rely on when you get married. It has been, and will be, such an honour to hold that moment for you, I’ve never taken it for granted. That’s why we’re taking this sabbatical, because I’d like to do this celebrant thing forever.

A guest at yesterday’s wedding is still upset she couldn’t book me for her wedding six years ago because I was booked then, and I’m getting similar vibes from people emailing about 2023 weddings at the moment.

I’ll be back - especially for tomorrow’s wedding at Sanctuary Cove, and the couples I’m coming back from Mexico to marry in November/December - but trust me when I say I don’t think I could carry on marrying people next year after the last three without something breaking, so we’re taking the courageous act of taking a break instead of being forced into one.

People always say this about their own job, but I know they’re lying, because I have the best job in the world. Thank you for giving it to me.

This is so bizarre and weird to listen to: AI-generated Joe Rogan interviews AI-generated Steve Jobs. By podcast.ai.

“Your audience is just so different to the normal Apple user”

Finally found the band for me

Tim Burrowes reports on Rupert Murdoch’s “remarkable” 70-year career in the media:

He created a newspaper empire which has shaped the culture of the English speaking world.

He made newspaper paywalls work when nobody else thought he would succeed.

He saw streaming coming and sold most of his TV and film interests to Disney at the top of the market.

I personally find the influence of News Corp and the Murdochs disgusting and intolerable, yet I can also look at that 70-year body of work and say it’s remarkable, amazing and will most likely never be repeated in a similar scale. Which is most likely a good thing.

The world is starting to reflect on 2020-2022 and what everyone did, and how we reacted, and I’m not reading many pieces that are all in with their support.

This is from Dr Raya Leibowitz, Israeli oncologist, a scientist (MD/PhD) and the head of a medium-sized oncology institute in Israel:

“I am writing so not to forget the response of governments and societies to the COVID-19 pandemic over the last 2.5 years; responses that were, for me and many others, dystopian. During this time, Israeli society, as I knew it, has dramatically changed for the worse.”

The thing I’m most interested in is how I even feel hesitant to share this piece because of the negative feedback I receive from my community for not being all-in on the response to the pandemic.

The article is a personal story of a doctor who held not-so-mainstream views and how her community rejected her. If the net effect of Covid is that you’re alive but living with division in community, living with fear and hatred of others, I think I’d rather be dead.

7 Photographers on Finding Your Voice

I could quote Robin Rendle’s post, ‘Take Care Of Your Blog’ forever:

“There will be blog posts that you adore that no one reads and there’ll be blog posts you spit out in ten minutes that take the internet by storm.”

My anxiety is of the opinion that none of you really care about me, contacting me or enjoying our family travels, if that’s so, please cease reading and thank you for confirming my deepest fears and anxieties. But, if you do wish to stay in contact with me and enjoy our photos and stories of lands far away, I have four notes for you:

1. Every email address you have for me is wrong unless it is my name then an @ symbol then my last name, finishing with a .co … delete all other addresses from your address book or contacts app. Email remains my personal favourite place to communicate, please email whenever and whatever you like.

2. If you must instant message with, or call, me I would prefer for it to happen on iMessage or FaceTime, contacting me with the same email address. If you refuse the beauty and glory of the apple ecosystem I am unsure how we can stay in contact. WhatsApp is ugly, Telegram is full of Russian spam, none of you use the Signal app, plus it’s linked to my phone number which I’ll get to in point three.

3. My phone number will be trashed, and in the future, I’ll have other phone numbers that I’d prefer to not have to keep any longer than internet access is required. I wish to de-link myself from phone numbers in general but the world seems to think they are important.

4. Although I am often tempted to post and share on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and whatever is hot online, my heart longs for a time when we take control of the stories we read, when we personally decide what we get angry or happy about. So my contribution to this effort is to write, photograph, publish, and share on my own personal blog joshwithers.blog … there’s also a weekly digest of what’s been published there and you can get it by visiting at joshwithers.blog/subscribe to subscribe.

If you wish to engage in the same kind of blogging I am, I can highly recommend micro.blog.

I publish, photograph, write, broadcast and share online to satisfy something inside of me that wants to contribute to the fabric of our society, to the story of our generation, and this is me doing that. If you think that’s a bit weird, you’ll love my blog.

An interesting piece from Ted Gioia where he highlights something I’d missed, that music, and music reporting, as turned from being fresh and new, to nostalgic and old.

Six days to Mexico.

“We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

• Scholar, Joseph Campbell

Making wedding photos today

50 ways to be ridiculously generous—and feel ridiculously good by Alexandra Franzen.

38. If you have a colleague who is self-employed, encourage them to charge more. Tell them, “You provide incredible value. You deserve to be paid what you’re worth. I think you should raise your rates. If that’s something you want to do—I’d love to help you do it.” If they’re open to it, help them brainstorm, strategize, and figure out a plan to roll out the new (higher) pricing.

Rules for Online Sanity

Becoming a dad shrinks your brain. I’m not mad, I’m just stupid.

Andrzej Stasiuk:

“It is good to come to a country you know practically nothing about.

Your thoughts grow still, useless.

In a country you know nothing about, there is no reference point. You struggle to associate colors, smells, dim memories.

You live a little like a child, or an animal.”

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but despite their ads this week, Optus wasn’t attacked.

They left the front door open and unlocked and a thief took the personal identity information of thousands of Australians.

The most horrible hotel in the world featured in Tone Knob by Nick Parker:

Then in 1996 they asked the new-kids-on-the-block agency KesselsKramer2 to help them sharpen things up – Which they did not by improving the hotel or doing a fancy re-brand, but by keeping everything exactly the same and proudly embracing how crap it all was. They started calling themselves ‘the most horrible hotel in town’.

My reading device of choice has been a Kindle Oasis (2nd model) I picked up at a Best Buy in Vegas in December 2017. It fast became my favourite little gadget. The Oasis was last updated in July 2019 - and Britt owns that model. It’s got a warmth setting and a smidge larger battery, but it’s basically the same.

So I’ve been waiting patiently for an Oasis upgrade or replacement. In the meantime I just have to recharge my Kindle every two days instead of every two months, no big deal ya know.

New Amazon product of the month, the Kindle Scribe, has been drawing lots of Remarkable 2 comparisons, and avid readers of this blog might remember I was a big fan of my Remarkable.

Since that review a few things have changed:

• I sold my iPad Pro because the Apple Silicon MacBooks married with a Remarkable 2 was a happier solution.
• I’ve now sold my Remarkable tablet because I’ve been downsizing in preparation for living in Mexico and travelling around.
• My Kindle Oasis remains unchanged, but desperate for replacement.
• I’ve also bought an iPad Mini because size - but it’s a terribly underpowered machine so that’s being relegated to “TV on airplanes and buses” duty with my kids.

So does the Scribe fit the Remarkable-loving, iPad-replacing, Oasis-upgrading dream I’ve been looking for?

It seems to be a really close fit, with one exception. The Oasis would have been one of the largest Kindles produced at 7", but the Scribe is a 10.2" device, almost matching the Remarkable, and I think that’s too big to lay in bed reading a book from.

So we wait.

We called our Airbnb the Tugun Pause because a few times a day you get to take a one to two second pause in your conversations

How good is it when you just find The One

I call this one “Jetstar flight captured over Brisbane with a manual focus lens”

If you’ve ever wanted to use our dishwasher, TV, or closet? You’re going to love the tugunpause.com.

Are there any signs we should look out for to see if Goldie is being fed enough?

Ted Gioia’s predictions of the music industry in 2032:

“A legitimate musical counterculture will arise, with a cadre of new artists achieving superstar status while rejecting the roles of influencer and content provider. The motto “music comes first” will be a key part of their marketing message. The movement will have a name, but that word doesn’t exist yet.”

“Individuals who can identify rising talent will set up their web channels, and fill the role once played by the A&R department at a record label. But there’s one big difference: they can do everything themselves without a huge corporation behind them. If these talent scouts have a web channel with a few million subscribers, they will have more clout than Sony (which, by the way, currently has a pathetic 40 thousand subscribers to its YouTube channel) or most other labels. They can sign artists, showcase them online, and build their audience—acting as sole operators, but with the influence of a big business.”

Cam Wilson in Web Cam on crime reporting:

“There’s a lot of good criticism of crime reporting. It fosters systemic racism. Crimes are reported on because of the novelty factor rather than merit. A lack of follow-ups means articles rarely show the full story of a crime (including if charges are dropped). It tends to uncritically share the narrative of police, even though they are unreliable narrators. And above all else, it publicises one of the lowest moments of someone’s life and probably makes it harder for them to right the ship.”

Andrew Greene reporting on the Optus data thief (they like to call the person a hacker):

WARNING - do not click on latest link from alleged Optus hacker. IT security experts confirm it “tries to use drive-by and explicit download techniques to install executable files - this appears to be an attempt to capitalise on the publicity from the hack to setup a future hack”

Optus’ lack of leadership in this data crisis will be its legacy.

Larry Miller, NYU, in The Future of Music podcast on The Verge hosted by Ariel Shapiro:

“The magnitude of most hits is smaller.”

“We’ve also noticed that the amount of music being uploaded and the vast majority of the new music is never listened to.”

“The streaming services, including TikTok, are great at breaking a track. They’re less great at breaking an artist and a career.”

Music has been such a shared experience - shared joys, shared sorrows - it’s such a valuable part of our cultural fabric that I wonder what the current state of music means for the fabric yet to be spun.

If I’m by myself I rarely listen to music, but with friends in the car, at concerts, or even sharing links to songs amongst us is where the songs make sense.

Is the divestment of the collective music experience another pointer towards a divided people?

Zane Lowe with Stevie Nicks is an beautiful podcast conversation not only about Fleetwood Mac, but also about Tom Petty, Prince, Harry Styles, Neil Finn, Miley Cyrus and The Gorillaz. The entire Zane Lowe interview series is a great show for music lovers.

Emma Elsworthy in the Crikey Worm this morning:

The nerds at NASA are going to smash a spacecraft into an asteroid hurtling through space this morning. It’s going to happen about 11 million kilometres from where you’re sitting now — and you can watch a livestream from 8am. The recipient of our pummelling will be a 163-metre-wide asteroid called Dimorphos that is orbiting a larger, 780-metre-wide asteroid.

It won’t be one guy and a joystick controlling the trajectory (how cool would that be?) — NASA says software will determine the point of impact. There will be a nail-biting moment in the last 50 minutes, however, when the software will need to differentiate between the larger asteroid and Dimorphos, as BBC writes.

Assuming all goes well, the livestream will cut off when the spacecraft hits, but luckily a mini satellite released from the spacecraft a few days ago will record the whole shebang from 50km away. Success will be measured by whether Dimorphos’ orbit (about 12 hours at the moment) is shortened by 10 minutes. But the chances are slim that we’ll actually need to do this in future — scientists reckon we’ve identified 95% of all monster asteroids that could cause a global calamity. The other 5%, however…

Update

They did the thing.

Why so dramatic, Rockhampton sunrise?

iOS 17 prediction: an Apple Shortcuts Store. After writing my first semi-complex-but-bit-that-complex shortcut for Apple Shortcuts today I can’t believe there’s not an App Store for Shortcuts. But I reckon it’s coming, Apple loves a good % cut.

Vinay Prasad, Professor, Hematologist, Oncologist, Health policy researcher, on the weird place we’re at with Covid vaccines today:

“The media coverage of vaccines and side effects is awful. They lack a philosophical framework and are unmoored. This article nicely shows how that is the case. Whether they choose to improve is beyond me. They have too much allegiance to the Biden administration, and have failed American boys as a result.”

Reading a recent Point Hacks email about the ol' ‘T-80’ Qantas rule reminded me of an Apple Shortcuts shortcut I’d been meaning to make for a while. I’m no programmer, or Shortcut-writer, but I whipped the shortcut up today and I think it works really well.

Stealing this next image from Point Hacks, extra seats open up 80 hours out from the flight:

If you’d like a reminder about that opportunity, download the shortcut on your Apple device now. It works on Mac, iOS, and iPadOS, basically anywhere Shortcuts works.

This Shortcut looks for a calendar entry in the next year that has the letters QF in it, assumes that’s a calendar entry about a Qantas flight, and can create a reminder 80 hours before that flight to remind you that most seats that are blocked due to status are now unlocked and you’re able to select that seat if it’s not already taken.